How to add metadata to your music

Part 6: What databases can be used for automatic song identification

Part 8: How do I get Artist Consistency in my Metadata

 

SongKong Tutorial Part 7: How to add metadata to your music

Where does the Album and Artist information, displayed in your music player, come from? In most cases this information is stored within the music files themselves as metadata. This is separate to the filename that may possibly contain some metadata such as Title or Track No but is not a practical way to store more then the bare minimum of information.

Different audio formats have different metadata formats, commonly known as tags. For example Flac and Ogg Vorbis files both use Vorbis Comments to store metadata whereas Mp3, Aif, Wav and Dsf all use ID3. But players and other tools such as SongKong usually try to hide these differences.

Metadata is added  by SongKong once the song (and album) have been identified. The Match tab helps determine how songs are identified whereas the Format tab decides what metadata is added. 

This is an important distinction, for example you may want SongKong to identify all your songs, but add no metadata to your songs apart from MusicBrainz Ids, this would be done by altering the configuration on the Format tab.

Additionally the Artwork tab defines how artwork is added, the Genre tab defines how Genres are added and the Classical tab defines additional special options for Classical music.

But we will begin with the Format tab