About a week ago I posted a rant about how anyone giving away MP3s should fill out the ID3 tags. Here’s another big example – I’ve been listening to the interviews from the Christopher Lydon collection. None of these things have ID3 tags filled out, and worse some of them have “Unknown artist” which makes WinAmp not even show the filename. The files are named correctly, but it screws up the interface. It makes them harder to listen to or to know which ones I’ve already listened to. Come on folks, fill them out.
I save the MP3s from a few of the WREK MP3 archive. The Subgenius shows are a prime one. I installed the MP3::Info Perl module, and wrote me a little script that rewrites the tags. Otherwise, they all say “Sun0000.mp3” or the like when I listen to them in WinAmp or my iRiver. Now, with one simple command line command, I can make them all say “Hour of Slack – September 14, 2003”. It works great, so even if you have no tools that will write the tags, you can always write a perl script to do it or have some geek at your firm do it or even have someone make a CGI script that will allow you to shovel your MP3 through it and return the rewritten one back out.
