Standarized Meta Data

[Louis_the_Brave]

Podcasters really need to standardize their meta data to make end-user file management easier. Ideally the "album" would be the name of the show. It wouldn't change daily. "Title" would be that day's show title and/or the date. "Artist" would be the author. E-mail addresses could be saved for "comment". Genre should be "Podcast". Why "speech"?
Either that or someone much geekier than I should put together a configurable Spinner so that bathes of podcasts could be updated. One of the joys of the podcast media is its ease of use. It only makes sense that meta data be handled in predictable ways. I wish someone would speak out on this issue.

[PBCliberal]

Excellent categorization. But some older mp3 coders (like the one in SoundForge 6.0) force you to "speech" (or "polka" if you try to enter "podcast")...but what the hell. Accordians are back in vogue.

And a one and a two and a

[theFerf]

lol pcliberal!

i agree. i just recently got an iPod and i get pissed all to hell at the poor formatting of podcasts. if i want to listen to all of you podcasts in a row, i dont want to have to go blindly searching through my 20gb of podcasts to find it.

[Daniel]

A lot of the later versions of the iPodders are now letting you override the playlist, genre and track numbers of downloaded podcasts to make this much easier.

[Craig]

I think there was another thread on this earlier. I basically agree with Louis:

Title: Show title and date (this usually scrolls on players so it can be longer)
Album: Podcast name
Artist: Podcaster name
Year: Duh
Track: Podcast number (let's you sort podcasts sequentially)
Genre: Podcast
Comments: Podcast URL, email, etc.

If your encoder doesn't let you use "Podcast" for genre there are plenty of utilities that let you easily change it after the fact. (Including iTunes, which also allows you to add an image for display in the iPod Photo, iTunes, Windows Media Player, etc.)

Craig

[theFerf]

very true craig, there are tons of programs for editing the tags.

[allthewhile]

I know for a fact doppler allows you to overide the mp3 tags.

[Neil]

I agree with Craig that we need a podcast number in the 'Track' field.
As theFerf has already mentioned lots of podcasts aren't sorted properly on the ipod because of the lack of a track number. This doesn't only make it hard to listen to in a series, but if you want to find a podcast which is a few days old, and you can't remember which one it is, you have to skip back and forth which isn't a fun task if there are 50 podcasts!

[theFerf]

Another thing I have noticed with my iPod is that when names are really long, i have a hard time finding the ones i want becuase the end of the file is cut off. For example:

The Dawn and Drew Show - 2005-02-27 as opposed to
Dawn & Drew - 2005-02-27 or
DND 71 - 2005-02-27

Not saying the dawn and drew podcast is like that, just using theirs as an example.

[Neil]

@ theFerf: Yes I agree. Perhaps a better way to do it would be:

05-02-07 DND or
05-02-07 The Dawn and Drew show etc

That way you can see the date, and mp3 players which organise by name will be happy :)

[Craig]

Ideally the name of the show shouldn't be in the Title tag at all, just in the Album tag. If it has to be in the Title tag then I agree that it should be at the end.

Craig