iPod and iTunes Hacks

Clean Up Your ID3 Tags

Keep Britney and Mozart separate by ensuring that the ID3 tags that describe your iTunes songs are correct.

When you insert a CD to be ripped in iTunes, it looks up the album information on the CD database (CDDB). All of the information about your CD magically appears in iTunes, which is very handy—except when the CDDB labels as Alternative music that you’d classify as Pop, or when information you think is important has been omitted. Back in the wild-west days of downloading from Napster, you could also find MP3s that someone else catalogued in an entirely different way. Suddenly finding that album or song you want in iTunes is like finding a digital needle in a haystack.

One song can contain a lot of information: the name of the song, the year it was made, and, thanks to the CDDB standard, a whole slew of additional useful information. Some tags get imported automatically when iTunes connects to the CDDB. Other tags (for example, Record Label) are there for you to fill in yourself. Following are lists of all the tags in the CDDB (see http://www.gracenote.com/gn_products/cddb.html).

Here are the Album data fields:

Album Title

The album title—includes sort information (e.g., so that Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” can be sorted under W instead of T)

Album Artist

The artist’s name—includes sort information (e.g., so that Dave Matthews Band can be sorted under Matthews instead ...