Can We Please All Work to Improve Metadata?
Metadata–the information we use to tag our digital files–is in rough shape. It’s fine (usually) if you purchase music from an online store like iTunes, but there’s much, much room for improvement.
For example, I received a lot of music through secure downloads directly from record labels. It’s stunning to see how bad a job many labels do tagging their own product. I’ve received dozens and dozens of files without information as basic as album title. The album title! WTF?
We need to agree on style, protocols and nomenclature if metadata is going to be of any use. And we need to set some standards when it comes to characters, punctuation and language.
Hypebot points us to v2.0 of The Music Metadata Style Guide, something that every single person involved in posting and distributing music.
It’s free. Download, learn and execute.
Being somewhat anal-retentive when it comes to music and it’s associated info, I can’t count how many times I’ve spent literally entire weekends either rebuilding my digital music catalog, due to some weird issue with iTunes, and most of that time was spent filling in all the lost or corrupted meta-data.
I don’t consider myself to be smarter than anyone else, but inputting meta-data is pretty self-explanatory, if you’re able to read/write English, so it’s always surprising to me when I hear stories like this one, where even the LABELS themselves seem to have trouble filling in the simplest, well labeled boxes where said meta-data goes.
As Duff McKagan wrote: “It’s so f*!@%ing easy.”