Author Archives: Zortam Support

What is metadata in Mp3 file

The term metadata sounds technical, but really it is just information (data!).  It is used everywhere, in web pages, software, television and radio broadcasting, and countless other places including music.

From a music perspective, metadata is simply information about your album, your songs and your mixes that you plan to include with your release by embedding the information right into the music files. Some common examples of music metadata are:

  • Album Name
  • Artist Name
  • Song Name
  • Genre
  • Year
  • Track Number
  • Copyright information
  • Engineer/Producer
  • Publisher
  • etc.

 

What is a music tagger

A music tagger is software that can edit information stored inside digital music files (mp3s, WMAs etc). This information, collectively known as ‘tags’, categorizes each music file. For instance, it states the name of the track contained within, the album it comes from and the name of the artists or performers.

Tags are important because music players, such as iTunes or Winamp, use the tags to display your music collection. For instance, the reason Winamp can show all of your albums in a list is because your tracks have that album name as one of their tags.

A music tagger can change tags and so re-organise your music collection.

Different music file formats, such as MP3, AAC and the like, have different ways of storing tags. MP3 has ID3 tags, OGG files have Vorbis comments and there are many more combinations.

The future of tagging

Taggers are useful tools but they have their limitations. I don’t feel they ‘scale’ well for large music collections. Also, they are at best semi-automated, so they require a little bit of mental effort and discipline to use.

What do I mean by not scaling well? When you have a collection in the hundreds or thousands of albums, if you want to make a cross collection change you are going to have to trudge through the entire library, trying not to get bored and trying not to make any mistakes. Further, whenever you add music, you’d better give it a manual check over or you will begin to introduce inconsistencies.

This is why I think full automated, rule based music management works best for large music collections. This way, music is assessed and fixed automatically, without the need for manual editing.

Music taggers are a great tool for a specific job.

Zortam Mp3 Media Studio

Zortam Mp3 Media Studio

What is new in version 23:

  • added mini player mode
  • switch application from maxi to mini mode and vice versa
  • automatically recognition of any Mp3 file using fingerprint technology, so you can tag your Mp3 files even if they do not have any information at all
  • batch mode for adding album arts and lyrics to Mp3 files
  • batch mode for Mp3 normalization (default level is 94.5 dB)
  • calculate BPM (Beats Per Minute) of Mp3 files
  • YouTube To Mp3 Downloader (Converter) with auto tag options
  • added visualization plugins and visualization plugin DirectX SDK for creating new visualizations  dll plugins. Check: https://www.zortam.com/plugins.html

“Full” application mode with mp3 player docked at the bottom

grayskinzmms_850_3

 

“Mini” application mode with mp3 with playlist and visualization window

miniplayer_800

Zortam releases Zortam Mp3 Media Studio 23 (Nov, 28 2017)

Zortam Mp3 Media Studio 23

What is new in version 23:

  • added mini player mode
  • switch application from maxi to mini mode and vice versa
  • automatically recognition of any Mp3 file using fingerprint technology, so you can tag your Mp3 files even if they do not have any information at all
  • batch mode for adding album arts and lyrics to Mp3 files
  • batch mode for Mp3 normalization (default level is 94.5 dB)
  • calculate BPM (Beats Per Minute) of Mp3 files
  • YouTube To Mp3 Downloader (Converter) with auto tag options
  • added visualization plugins and visualization plugin DirectX SDK for creating new visualizations  dll plugins.