Friday, September 2, 2011

Embedding track info and album artwork in MP3 files

Ever wonder how, when you put a CD in your computer, it magically knows the track information, like the track title, album title, artist, genre, etc? This magic has a name: ID3 tags.

Click the image to enlarge!

Independent artists making their own albums, such as myself, have to understand how the ID3 tags are applied and how they function. Otherwise, when you play Bits and Pieces, the track list will be Track1, Track 2, etc.

With the right software, this process is quite simple. First off, make sure that the tracks are exported as an MP3, rather than an WAV or FLAC. 
Although MP3 is a "lossy" file format (meaning the file is compressed), WAV files ("lossless"/uncompressed) do not support ID3 tags, meaning embedding track information would be impossible. As especially cool thing that ID3 allows is to embed the album artwork right into the file, so everywhere that the CD is played, the artwork is available/displayed. This means that, when you play Bits and Pieces in iTunes or on your iPod, you can use the CoverFlow view to find Bits and Pieces tracks! Snazzy, indeed.

The program I use for this task is Roxio Edit Audio Tags, which is included in the lovely Roxio Creator 2011 Pro Suite that I use for everything and am in love with.

Hopefully, this helps anyone who was wondering why their WAV files were not accepting the ID3s (or am I the only one who didn't know ID3s and WAVs aren't friends?). It took me a half hour to solve the mystery, but hey -- it's solved now. (: