Posts Tagged ‘mp3’
Prepping MP3s For IPod Touch
Ok, so I finally bought a 2nd gen. IPod Touch and I thought my only concern was to add album covers to all my mp3s and that’s it, until I ran into problems. You probably won’t have problems if you used ITunes to organize your mp3s for IPod Touch – since any mp3 tags created by ITunes should in theory be recognized by IPod Touch. But for me, ITunes is good for playing music, but not very good for organizing them, so I had to look elsewhere. I still need to use ITunes for syncing apps, photos, videos, contacts and calendars.
Music information is such as artist, title, album art are stored in the mp3 file as ID3 tags. ID3 tags are a standard so there should be compatibility right? Wrong, because there are several versions of the ID3 standard already and a lot of differences between versions – there is a compliance problem across programs and players.
On a PC, my preferred tool for organizing mp3 is MediaMonkey:
- It has a “Files to Edit” feature that singles out mp3 with missing entries like “Unknown album art” which makes it easier to go through your entire collection.
- It can search Amazon for album art.
- It can watch folders for changes in files (unlike ITunes).
- It also has the ability to sync with my IPod Touch (but current version has problems when updating changes in lyrics mp3 tag to IPod Touch, however, it is able to do it correctly the first time the mp3 is copied over to the IPod Touch.) Playlists can also be synced.
- However, it could not edit extended ID3 tags such as the one being used by IPod Touch for lyrics. Lyrics for songs can be displayed on IPod Touch, these are unsynchronized lyrics, meaning they are just plain text displayed, whereas synchronized lyrics are text with time synchronized with the song and are displayed like a karaoke song line by line as the song progresses. IPod Touch uses an extended tag named “UNSYNCEDLYRICS” to store the text for the lyrics.
In order to make up for the lyrics problem, I used Mp3Tag and MiniLyrics:
- Mp3Tag supports extended tags and allows me to manually edit the “UNSYNCEDLYRICS” tag.
- MiniLyrics is a cool app that will play synchronized lyrics like a karaoke (or display unsynchonized lyrics if synchonized version is not available). It can search online for lyrics and save it to the mp3 file. Of course, you need to look for a lyrics version that is in sync with your version of mp3. IPod touch currently does not play synchronized lyrics though, at not directly – maybe someone will write an app for this soon. There seems to be such apps available for a jailbroken IPod Touch (unfortunately, 2nd gen. IPod Touch is not yet jail broken).
IPod Touch quirks to watch out for while organizing your mp3s:
- Albums with the same name are automatically grouped together even if they belong to different artists (as of version 2.2 firmware). Mediamonkey would automatically detect albums with different artists. Workaround is to append artist information to album name, manually make your album name unique, in other words.
- Album cover picture file should not contain embedded color profile information (seems to cause IPod Touch not to display the album cover). Just edit the picture and resave it to remove any color profile and it should work fine.
What size should the album art picture be?
- Album art ranges from 150×150 pixels to 600×600 pixels. On an IPod Touch, 300×300 would display quite fine. just try to find the highest quality picture possible.
Where to find album cover art when it is not available on Amazon? Trying to find lesser known albums is really a pain.
- Older albums: Discogs
- OPM (Filipino) music: GMA Records, Regal Films, Titik Pilipino, Vicor Music
- General: Google Image Search, Wikipedia
Where to find or buy mp3s when ITunes Store is not available yet in your country (like Philippines)? Yeah, I know you can get your mp3s elsewhere, but in case you want to buy…
