What are ID3 tags and why do you care?

 

ID3 tags can greatly improve the usefulness of your audio files, and even improve the SEO of your podcast! I’ll show you what they are, how to create and edit them, and how they can make your life better and you SEO stronger!

Transcript

Hey folks, welcome to another HeroPress Tip of the Week. This week, we’re going to talk about ID3 tags, what they are and why you care.

Now I’ll get right to the point here and say that ID3 tags are related specifically to mp3 files, audio files. So if you’re not working with them, this may not interest you. I suggest watching because it’s, it’s interesting inherently. But it’s specifically for working with mp3 files.

ID3 tags hold metadata about mp3s. Now Metadata is data about data. So your mp3 file is a data file, it holds audio. The metadata is plain text fields that have things like title, date, genre, track number, things like that.

And ID3, here on Wikipedia, it says is a metadata container, most often used in conjunction with the mp3 audio file format. There are two different versions version one and version two. You don’t really care. They both work pretty much on every platform. And most systems that handle them handle both of them. So if you input fields in version one, it’s going to get copied division two… just… you don’t care.

So first, I’m going to show you how to edit them. And then I’m going to show you why you want to do this and why it matters.

Here I have a little folder with four mp3 files. I have one from… these are podcast episodes. So I have Aurooba, Caroline, Alice, and Aditya. Now, I’m going to click on a ditches here. And over on the right, you will see there is a field here in macOS, in Finder for title and another for authors.

That’s because the ID3 tags have been filled out. But if I click on Alice’s, they’re not there. So let me show you how I put mine in here. And then I’ll tell you how you can do yours. It’s going to be very similar.

I have an app installed called VLC. And it’s a very common open source, multimedia player, plays video, audio, you can get it for free. I mean, let’s see, it is I believe that vlc.com, no videolan.org. And you can get it here. I love it. It works great. It’s free. I recommend it.

So I’m going to right click on Alice’s file and go to open with VLC. And we could have just opened VLC first and open it that way, it doesn’t really matter. So you can’t hear it. But it’s playing right now. So I’m going to hit pause. Now I have it here in my playlist. And I’m going to go to Window, Media information. Now I’m on a Mac, but VLC is cross platform. So if you’re on Windows or Linux, it’s going to be really, really similar. You’re going to look for that window menu and go to Media Information. Or whatever your alternative for command I is.

And here it is. So we don’t want to change the title. If we did. Oh, no, we do. We do want to change title. This is not the final name. So I’m going to that, artists, Hallway Chats. And the date. Boy, this was in 2022, month of November, it was at WordCamp Italy, which was somewhere near the third week. So I’m going to say 21 Just figure it out. No, that’s too close to Thanksgiving. Let’s call it 15 There we go.

Now you could put in anything that’s appropriate and leave anything you don’t, I’m not going to put a track number because there aren’t tracks. I don’t have an album. A lot of these are for music on from albums. I can put in the description I can put in a copyright. Let’s do that. 2022. Publisher, Hallway Chats.

Then, that’s really all we’re going to do. I’m going to show you there’s codec details, which is information about it and some statistics boring, but we’ll save metadata. And then close that. And I’m going to just close VLC. And you’ll see nothing changed in the left here. But now on the right, you can see there’s our title. And there is the author. Oh, and there’s a copyright.

So now let me show you why it matters. We’re going to go to WordPress here, we’re going to go to posts, I’m going to edit my playlists post. And I’m going to put in an audio playlist.
Except the way you do that a Gutenberg is to use the classic editor. So right here is an Add Media button. And it says create audio playlist. Now we want to select files. We’re going to go to Hallway Chats demo, we’re just going to select all.

Now, I have highlighted right here, Aditya. And over on the right, you can see the title, artist and album are already filled in. And there is a description. I didn’t put in the description. WordPress figured that out from the data. The other data that I put in.

We go over to Alice, you’ll see it as the same thing. Now, for Aditya’s, I put in a genre podcast for Alice’s, I didn’t didn’t figure that out. I also didn’t put an album.

Now we go over to Caroline. For a title, we get the file name, and nothing for the description really. And the same for Aurooba. So let me hit Create a new playlist. And you’ll see for captions, it uses the right things. And we’ll hit insert audio playlist.
And now look at my playlist. It has a Adita Kane by Hallway Chats. And Alice Orru by Hallyway Chats, but then just filenames. So let’s go preview this.

And it just looks like that. Now I’m going to go back and edit this, I don’t want images.
I thought I would take that away. Well, let’s say you have your title, genre. And author, let’s take out your artists name. There.

So before it used to say dash Hallway Chats, and now it doesn’t. So save draft view preview again. So right there it says all the chats, reload, and it makes it go away. So this particular case is the multimedia player in WordPress. But every media player on the planet is going to use these. So your podcasting app on your phone, your mp3 player, your smart device, your television, your everything. Everything reads ID3 tags. And so when you put them in there and the content that you’ve created, it really helps everyone who’s consuming it.

Now, I showed you how to do it with VLC. But again, because it’s so universal, just about any media tool can help with this, you can edit them with iTunes, I don’t want to do it right now, because I don’t want to fire up iTunes. There are third party apps you can get. You can do it right on your phone.

Just about anything that can read this data will often, like if you have the file, will let you edit it as well. So find the way that is most comfortable for you. In fact, on a Mac, if your files are named in a certain format, your Mac can automatically go through and insert all the metadata based on just the file name.

They have to be all named just right. And so that’s almost as much work as just doing the metadata yourself, but it can do it.

So we’ve looked at metadata, we’ve looked at ID3 tags, and we’re going to talk more about this in future videos. And so that’s one of the reasons I wanted to get it out here and get you familiar with it. But if you create audio, or even video ID3 tags work in video too.
If you create multimedia files, please edit your ID3 tags, because it makes life easier for everyone who consumes your content.

Hope you find this useful.