An advisory (or a rant)
Dear valued audio2u.com podcast listener,
If you know me at all, you would probably know that one thing I cherish in this world is consistency.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not averse to change if there’s a good reason for it!
What I hate is when things that SHOULD be consistent are not, because of laziness or sloppiness on the part of the creator.
What am I talking about here?
I’m talking about metadata in podcast mp3 files.
There are very few podcasts that I have come across where the metadata can be relied upon to remain consistent from one episode to the next.
Why is that important, you may well ask?
Well, the information contained in say, the ‘album’ field of the mp3 file will determine what ‘album’ the mp3 file appears to belong to on your mp3 player.
Likewise, the information contained in the ‘artist’ field will determine which artist the file appears under on the mp3 player.
So, if the content creator subtly changes the information in the ‘artist’ field from one episode to the next, then all those episodes of that podcast will not appear under the same ‘artist’ listing on your mp3 player.
No doubt, some of you have already been frustrated by this!
OK, you say. Bruce is anal about metadata. What of it?
Well, the reason for this post is to advise that I am making a change to the ‘album’ metadata for all 3 of my podcasts effective immediately.
Instead of all my podcasts belonging to the album ‘audio2u.com podcast’, the album name will now reflect the name of the podcast.
Hopefully, this will not be too disconcerting for you all.
It just means that all future episodes will not be listed under the same album (on your mp3 player, or in the WMP, iTunes, MediaMonkey database etc) as the episodes you currently have.
Thank you.
And now back to your regularly scheduled programming…
Bruce,
I highlight the name of the all older MP3s in my database, edit info, change the Album name to the new name. Click OK. End of issue. Am I missing something? Oh, maybe in the comment box, “Bruce is the man!”. No worries, really. Metadata or not your consistency to me is quality of content. Thanks for the heads up!
Rob
Yep Rob,
That’s exactly what I do, too!
But it is frustrating if you didn’t think to do it before you sync to your mp3 player, and then find that the various episodes are scattered all over the library because of inconsistent metadata!
Thanks for that Bruce! That is why I have 3 different artist groups for the same podcast. I used to take the time to edit the tag file with an editor so they would be grouped. I gave up and now I have different variations on spacing and punctuation of the same show. I wish others were anal about their podcast!! Thanks for all the time and effort you put into your shows. The audio is excellent and the quality is great!
I listen to heaps of talks downloaded on iTunes and not only; yours are of the highest quality, as I receive them.
i second the above opinions,
thanks for the heads up on the tagging, but the quality and consistency we are most appreciative of is in the audio work, and the content.
keep up the good work!
Cute. I can’t even keep the *sequential numbers* in my podcasts straight.