To all those posting podcasts and mp3s, fill out your ID3 tags. Seriously.
WTF is an ID3 tag? Well it has nothing to do with those folks over at ID who managed to create the fantastic Doom and Quake FPS games, nope, but it has everything to do with identification fields in your mp3 files.
If you are using WinAmp, and you should if you’re on Windows, cause it rawks, you should try right-clicking an mp3 loaded in your playlist and choose the “View file info” option.
See all those nifty fields in there? Well fill em out before you’re putting that mp3 or podcast of yours online.
“But why? My name is in the mp3s filename already, ain’t that enough?” you ask.
But no, think beyond the limited options of the filename oh dear podcaster. What if for instance I dish up this year old mp3 DJ set from my hard drive that I haven’t listened to in ages, and have actually completely forgotten about, by some obscure DJ I can’t remember who it is, and it bloody rawks my assin?
What if I go like “Oooh, this shit is wack, I wonder if there’s more where that came from.”?
Well, tough luck, cause without an email address or even better, a mention of a website in the ID3 Comment field, there’s no way in bloody hell I’m going to remember where in cyberspace I got that file from.
And it gets even better. More and more people are using stuff like last.fm which automatically spies on their WinAmp (yes, again, it’s the shizzle) and submits whatever is being played to the online database, which can be consulted, easily, as long as the ID3 tags are filled out correctly.
Online stats of your podcast, now how cool is that? Just by spending a few seconds on filling out those blasted ID3 fields.
Pretty sweet huh?
Oh, and it would save me the trouble of manually filling in the genre field to sort things properly in WinAmps media library.
Photo by Phimtida, cc-licensed.