Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Using iTunes as an ID3 Tag Editor

iTunes is a great application, but it can sometimes present you with a vexing problem: you drag an MP3 file into iTunes, it imports the song... but then you can't find it! You search by artist or album, but no luck. This can happen if the ID3 tag of the file is not set, because iTunes uses the ID3 tag to sort MP3 files. For example, if you have a file named 'The_Zutons_Who_killed_the_Zutons_02_Pressure_Point.mp3' without a proper ID3 tag, then once it is added to iTunes it ends up in the Unknown Artist folder and you can't find it in iTunes by artist, album or song name. One workaround to this is to get an ID3 tag editor and edit your files prior to adding them to iTunes (I've used ID3 Editor on OS X and MediaTagger on PC), but wouldn't it be better to be able to edit the ID3 tag directly in iTunes and skip the intermediate application?

Playlists to the Rescue!

To get around this problem, when adding files that may not have the ID3 tag set up properly, do not just drag them onto the 'Music' icon where they can get lost. Instead, create a playlist and drag the the files into the playlist. The files will show up in the playlist regardless of the state of the ID3 tag, then you can just do 'Get Info' in iTunes to edit their ID3 tags.

OS X ScreenGrabs

Dragging an .mp3 file to a playlist



Editing the ID3 tag with Get Info

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