Edit ID3 Tags Easily

Being a podcaster I have cause to edit ID3 tags on a regular basis. For some reason unknown to me I have had no end of issues getting it right. To this day you download the podcast and I don’t see any album art. But I now have a great solution.

ID3 tags are like an attachment of extra data to an MP3 file that tell you all that good stuff about the file like who the artist is and what album it comes from. Or metadata for the geeks. This is especially important with MP3 players like iPods. Album art is a great addition to a podcast and ours has recently been updated and now includes Knightwise my co-host so I want it in there. Plus I am a perfectionist and I want everything perfect.

So I have tried a few methods and none have been great or easy. The first thing I used was the Advanced Tag Editor in Windows Media Player (WMP). Most people would say that was a poor choice, I agree. But since I had never done it before and the parameters I had to use were described in terms of WMP I used it. For some reason when I edited tags using the Advanced Tag Editor they would not be saved or would sometimes work and sometimes not. I have not been able to find out why, so I gave up and used the tag editor that is part of WinAmp, it worked but does not support album art.

It came up in our The Podcast Network Intranet that the Tag editor was a pain to find in WMP 11 (which is true). Then it came out that most of us did not use WMP. A few alternatives came out. One being iTunes which I was not keen on. Mainly because it added more things to what I had to do. Add file to Music, edit the tag, remove the file. Just painful, probably effective though. Then an application called AudioShell was suggested. This was the best bit of advice I could have received.

AudioShell is an extension to the Microsoft Windows Explorer shell. It adds two tabs to the right click → Properties screen as shown here:

From here you see the extended information for the selected file. The second tab is the editor. Edit the tag and add the art and hit OK or apply and your tag is complete. Very easy and simple. With seamless integration to the tasks that I do, I am stoked. (Note cool new album art for The Global Geek Podcast).

The supported file formats is impressive:

• MP3: all ID3 tag versions
• wma, asf and wmv (including DRM protected files)
• m4a, m4b, m4p and mp4
• ogg, flac (vorbis comment tags)
• mpc, mp+ (APE/APEv2 tags)
• monkey’s audio (APE/APEv2 tags)
• wav pack (APE/APEv2 tags)
• optim frog (APE/APEv2 tags)
• wav (ID3v2 tag in ‘tag’ RIFF chunk)

So that should cover most peoples requirements and certainly those of the average podcaster. So now I am going to use this over everything else because it can not get any easier. All the best things are free as is this software, so even better. Obviously being an explorer extension it is a Windows only application.

Many thanks to Ewan Spence, host of TPN Rock on The Podcast Network for his recommendation.

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Goats Rounded Up!

I posted the other day about an issue I had with some stray goats… Looks like there was some strange happenings in the tag department. But the WordPress guys have come good and fixed the problem. I do not feature in the goat tags on WordPress any more

There has been some interesting and very funny communications with WordPress support the last day or so. I am sure that they won’t mind me publishing this last email I got from them:

Hi,
We got rid of the goats  🙂
It’ll probably be some other farmyard animal soon, but for now you are a goat free zone  🙂
Sorry!

They have been extremely apologetic and helpful regarding this issue. I am sure it took them some time to get to the end of the goat problem. I had a chuckle when I received the email. I hope they know I can see the funny side. This is another demonstration of why the WordPress community is a great place to be.

Thanks guys I am glad the pesky goats are gone they were starting to gag on the transistors. Weird how this stuff happens, but I guess this is a massive database and anything is possible.

Helipad: Think Notepad but Better

This new on-line note taking service looks good. Although “note taking” seems a very bland way to describe a service that looks and feels as good as this does.

Helipad is a note service, however there are few things that make it so much better than the standard Windows notepad. I use notepad a lot, it is great for stripping HTML and a quick way to jot a note. But then you end up with all these .txt files that have really weird file names that you thought made sense at the time. They don’t now. Helipad makes creating, editing and finding those notes very easy and fun.

It has a “widget-like” look to the main page with the Ajax type interface. Obviously you can create a new note or document very easily. However, the one feature that sets this apart from others and especially notepad is the ability to tag your notes. The tags create a “tag cloud” at the top of the page which makes finding related notes easy. Other features include an auto save, live searching, different themes and plug-ins, sharing of documents and changing fonts in preparation for printing. There is a plan for the ability to export documents as a PDF as well as a drop and drop interface.
The site also makes available the API for developers and a separate one to write add-ons for the service. It will be interesting to see what applications can be generated and the “inventions” that people come up with.

So you are nowhere near your PC or laptop and get a surge of inspiration. No problem, whip out the mobile or something like a Treo™ and access Helipad from the mobile friendly web-page. Very cool. If you can access the Internet you can access your documents.
If you don’t like the look of the default theme or others you can also customise the colour and add functionality to it. But I must admit I am a fan of the K.I.S.S ideology; Keep It Simple Stupid. Notepad is simple and that is what makes it good. Helipad does this but does it better.

Mac users keep an eye out for the downloadable version that is coming soon, enables you to work offline.

No word on the site or their blog exactly how they are going to make money from the service. It would be great to see it stick around, it deserves to. All this costs someone something, so I hope that they either have heaps of cash or someone else that has heaps of cash and that they are doing it for the love of it. Great ideas and originality seem to be able to stick around, especially with the API made available. Perhaps some bright spark will come up with some way to implement it into MySpace or something like that.

Good luck to them though as it looks like a good idea and one that has huge potential for lots of applications and uses.