When you get your music from digital sources, either by purchasing them online or by ripping them from a physical media, i.e. a music CD, you'll find out that most of the important information in identifying the song will be virtually stripped, and is reduced to its bare essentials. While this may be of little concern to an average person, music enthusiasts may find this rather annoying, as the information will be vital in the proper identification of the song, especially if their chosen player is able to display all this information onscreen. The song information will also be valuable if one wishes to compile and arrange their entire music library in an organized way.
Getting Song Information
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Aside from the title and the artist, the song information could contain several others like the album art, the album title, year in which the song is released, and sometimes the full lyrics of the song. All of this information is stored inside the file itself as metadata. With the proper media player, the information can then be displayed onscreen during music playback, allowing the listener to identify the song properly. The proper song information can also be useful to certain media players who use them when the user decides to go through their playlist on a per-album or per-artist basis.
One of the methods used in adding information to a song file, is using a dedicated tagging software for it, like an mp3 manager. With it, the user can manually add the proper song information like album title, track number, song title, etc., to the file, and even add the appropriate album art to it. However, seeing as manually editing a song file can be a tedious task, especially if you need to find the song information from different sources, and the fact that most users contain at least several hundreds of song in their collection, there are also several other methods that make this tedious task much easier.
Automatically Adding Complete Song Information
1. Many popular media players, such as iTunes, recent versions of Windows Media Player, and VLC Player, now offer to download the complete song information straight from the internet. With just a few clicks and using an internet connection, you can have all the information downloaded and embedded on your music instantly, without the hassle of manually editing them. For even easier work, you can set the options to automatically download all of the song information as soon as the music file starts playing.
2. An mp3 organizer software like Rinse iTunes is also a great companion to use, especially if you're housing a huge music library. They can help you if fixing misspelled information, remove duplicate ones, and even download the proper album art for the song. Using in combination with the built-in functions for your media player, it can make organizing your entire music collection much easier, and much faster than conventional methods.
The problem with automatic organization is that sometimes, the player may download the wrong information for the song, or may not even find the proper information for the song at all. This problem is virtually nonexistent for popular songs, whose information is commonplace, but as a song gets rarer, sometimes, it makes it even harder to find the information for it. In this case, adding the information manually is the best way to ensure information accuracy.