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Chapter 11, Hardware
#98 Sync Your iRiver with Linux
HACK
Downloaded MP3 Files and ID3 Tags
The iPod does not care about the filenames of MP3 files; all its database
information is supplied by ID3 tags within the MP3 files. Therefore, these
must be present for transferred files even to appear on the iPod.
You might want to add MP3 files that did not come from a CD (e.g., those
downloaded from Napster, Kazaa, etc.) to your iPod. The ID3 tags in such
files are often inappropriate; for example, because they feature the original
artist/album name from the CD they came from, instead of the logical group
to which they will belong on your iPod (e.g., Misc/80s Synth Pop). If you do
nothing about this, you will find each song appearing in its own artist/
album category, with no useful grouping. You’ll also need to tag manually
when CDDB lookup fails (e.g., for non-industry CDs) or for MP3 files that
were hand-encoded from WAV.
To change the tags, you’ll need a tool such as ID3ed (http://www.dakotacom.
net/~donut/programs/id3ed.html; free). This tool is pretty straightforward,
and it comes with a helpful man page. The synopsis says:
id3ed [-s songname] [-n artist] [-a album] [-y year]
[-c comment] [-k tracknum] [-g genre] [-q] [-SNAYCKG]
[-l] [-L] [-r] [-i] [-v] files...
Obviously, you don’t need to include all of those options. Here’s an example:
% id3ed -s "Red House" -n "Jimi Hendrix" \
-a "Are You Experienced?" ...