I am getting my MP3 collection ripped from my CD collection and ready to go on my Empeg as soon as I get it. I have a question though.... I only want to title the artist, song name, album and track number once (I have quite a large collection). What is the best format to title my individual tracks so that it will jive with the Emplode software and make it easiest to set up my playlists?

Example:

Artisit - Album - Track Number - Track Name

or

Track Name - Artist - Album - Track number

or ect....


Thanks!

"I drank what?" - Socrates

It shouldn't matter what you call the tracks, 'cause emplode looks at the id3 tags... =)
(So make sure you fill them out, or get your ripping software to do it...=)
Personally, I use the "Track number - Artist - Song.mp3" format (with them in an album directory), and I have a little tool to fill the id3-1 tags from this (emplode can now use id3-2 tags, which is recommended for long track names =)...

Jazz
(List 112, S/N 00030, 4 gig blue)

Sorry I'm not completely familiar with this, but what is an id3 tag? I am using RealJukebox Plus to rip my CD's, and it is titling the tracks using it's cddc connection.

Will this work?

Thanks!

"I drank what?" - Socrates

Quite likely...

The ID3 tag is a small amount of data tacked onto the end of the file. Software like emplode and winamp can look at this and give you the Artist, Title, Album, Year and a small comment..

ID3-2 goes at the front of the file, and contains much the same, but without any limit on name length (and it's extendable, so could hold stuff like lyrics, relative volume etc)

I use MusicMatch 5 and it titles them with both ID3-1 and ID3-2 tags...
Best bet is to search for id3 in the RealJukebox help... =)

Jazz
(List 112, S/N 00030, 4 gig blue)

Hm. I've been using Audio Catalyst 2.1 to rip CD's - I think that uses ID3v1 - so would I need a 3rd party app to use ID3v2?

- Jon

I've been using this one quite a lot lately because of it's ease of use. It's a little buggy, but I find it fast and convenient and I can work around the bugs.

It's called MP3ext. It basically adds another property page in explorer for MP3 files. Basically, bring up the properties on a file and you can edit it's ID3v2 tag. For backward compatibility, it even puts an ID3v1 tag on the file as well (truncating strings where necessary).

At first I found it clumsy, but once I learned how everything worked it all made sense.

Anyway, here is where it is:

www.mutschler.de/mp3ext

Kureg

FWIW - I've been using MP3ext for quite some time and love it. I've had issues with the newer versions, so I'm still using one that's pretty old- it doesn't support v2, but seems much more stable to me. Definitely agree that it seems clumsy at first, but it's not hard to get the hang of(although the older versions weren't documented very well, and it took a lot of messing around to figure out how to do certain things).

One thing I wanted to throw in here...

It's already been said that Emplode and the Empeg only look at the ID3 tags, so the file names are unimportant once the songs are loaded into the Empeg.

But if song order is important to you (for instance, if you listen to a lot of Pink Floyd), you should name your files in order so that you can drag and drop them onto Emplode in the correct order. There is another thread on this BBS in which I discussed this issue (anyone have that link handy?).

My personal preference is:

Artist - Album - Tracknumber(2digits) - SongTitle.mp3

If chronological order is important to you, you can do this:

Artist - Year - Album - Tracknumber - SongTitle.mp3

___________
Tony Fabris

The way I have all my MP3s titled (for the stereo in my front room) is

Artist-Track Title-Mix,Edit,Qualifier

No spaces between the " - " and the words, and any spaces are really underscores "_".
I found that having the extra info in the title (like Album name, Track Number, Genre, Year) was just clutter, since everything was in the tag. But, thats just me.