terrible torrents torment teens

May 11, 2007 12:51 PM

Why do so many torrent music collections not have proper mp3 tags?

Has anyone else experienced this? You download a collection of albums for a particular artist and the mp3 files don't have any information for track name, artist name or album name. Usually this information is contained in the file name but WinAmp, iTunes or other such programs don't know anything about the file.

Is this an attempt to avoid the wrath of RIAA?

posted by Bonzai to media & arts (12 answers total)

I think it's just laziness. I see this frequently with collections of radio shows and it drives me nuts, particularly because some are serials and track order is important.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 1:03 PM on May 11, 2007 [1 favorite]

Old school: "Why would anyone use ID3 tags? I keep my music organized by folders and play everything through Explorer, so I don't need them."
posted by smackfu at 1:04 PM on May 11, 2007

You get what you pay for.
posted by unixrat at 1:04 PM on May 11, 2007

No I think it's just laziness. There are people out there who don't use jukebox-type music programs, and thus don't care very much about the metadata embedded in the files.

There are programs which can read the filename, if it's in a consistent format, and embed that information in the ID3 tags. SnackAmp, which I believe is cross-platform (it definitely runs on Linux, and I suspect some poor misguided soul probably made a Windows port), does this, among many other things.

The Rolls Royce of ID3 tagging, though, is probably MusicBrainz, which not only will try to guess them from the filename and other info, but will also send in an "acoustic fingerprint" to a server and get the metadata that way. Versions exist (free) for Windows, Linux, and Mac, including as an iTunes plugin.
posted by Kadin2048 at 1:08 PM on May 11, 2007 [1 favorite]

To throw another option out there, I've been using Tag&Rename for years now, and it serves me very well for situations such as this.
posted by phaded at 1:20 PM on May 11, 2007

it really depends on where you get them from, and always has, really.

More public p2p networks are going to have a lot of crap, sampled at poor rates, with low chance of m3u's, proper tags, or covers because there is little reward for seeding. Private/closed p2p networks, where the user has the opportunity to gain reputation or otherwise is beholden to policies usually have very good releases. Public shaming is an excellent motivator.

it was the same diff between Napster and USENET.


Many folks who create 'scene' releases are more interested in the competition to get it out first and best, rather than the actual product or content itself.

but yeah, why does the general public not care about proper tagging? Well, they probably didn't rip the music themselves and wrecked a good rip or used a bad source, or if they did rip it, they didn't know what they were doing.
posted by fishfucker at 1:20 PM on May 11, 2007

I think I assumed laziness the first couple of times I ran across this too, but I can't think of a CD ripper that doesn't automatically go grab the ID info from FreeDB.org (or whatever it's called now after it imploded) so what are they using? Unless they all doing the ripping off-line.

But unixrat says you get what you pay for.

I wasn't even looking for a solution so thanks Kadin2048 and phaded. (I was just kvetching after spending 15 minutes renaming all the tracks from 5 Ween albums)
posted by Bonzai at 1:38 PM on May 11, 2007

*EDIT* But AS unixrat say ....
posted by Bonzai at 1:39 PM on May 11, 2007

A third option that I have been using for years is moreTunes.
posted by Industrial PhD at 7:32 PM on May 11, 2007

On preview, I'm seconding Kadin2048, except for the 'laziness' bit. People just do things in different ways.

---

Even when tags are used, different people have different conventions or interpretations that might be inconsistent with how you might have done things. People don't agree on the genre of many bands, for instance, and there is a broad spectrum of native languages and spelling abilities that often necessitate the re-tagging of every song. In the early days, it was usually easier to just run a script to remove all of the tags, and then use folder names and file names to organize everything.

Over time I've grown to favor the filing system method; but then again over time we've become overrun with all of these little LCD-screen-covered gadgets that show us useful information based on the tags. Since I have been diligent and consistent about how I've filed music since day one (it could hardly be called 'laziness') I was able to tag my whole collection by running a single script that parsed the relevant information from the file and directory names and filled in the appropriate tags.
posted by foobario at 8:30 PM on May 11, 2007

@Bonzai - Though I still vote for laziness/disinterest overall (e.g. my S.O., on me telling her that I had fixed all the metadata in her MP3 collection: "you did that? I've been avoiding doing that for years!"), I think there's another issue with some P2Ped music.

The online databases like CDDB (whatever they're calling it this week) only function after someone's put the information in there. If you're the first person to get the CD, then it won't be in the database. So if you're ripping a leaked pre-release CD from a radio station, or other sketchy source, in order to upload it to the P2P nets first, then the CDDB information isn't going to exist. I think most of the people that do this, care more about uploading than they do about the metadata, so they just RAR it up un-tagged. Whichever file hits the nets first tends to proliferate, so that un-tagged file tends to stick around, long after the album itself has made it into CDDB, and anyone who went out and ripped it themselves would end up with nice, tagged files.

Anyway, that was the only other explanation I could think of.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:38 PM on May 11, 2007

I don't bother with tags, since neither my computer nor my HDD mp3 player needs them. I got an ipod a while back, which gave an incentive for fixing the tags, so I did, but the ipod interface is such crap I got rid of it. I currently also have an ipod shuffle, but since it's a shuffle, it has no use for tags either. So I'm back to no use for tags for any of my players.

I do try to keep the tags correct, even though I have no use for them, on the grounds that one day they may come in handy as I might end up with an mp3 player that uses tags and doesn't suck, but if I look at my music in itunes, it's pretty obvious that there are still files that have managed to slip through the gaps and have insufficient tags. If I made them available for download, they would drive someone who was dependant on tags nuts. And I'm sure there are plenty of people like me who do make their files available for download.
posted by -harlequin- at 9:49 PM on May 11, 2007