Recording - September 2017 - 62

Keeping

Track

Metatagging and the data you need to manage-an engineer's guide

By Aaron J. Trumm

t may not be a glamorous notion, but handling data properly is one of the biggest differences between a
professional and an amateur in music production. When it comes to selling music to other professionals or
making sure your image is awesome when fans find you, good tagging and tracking of recordings is of the

utmost importance. Since many recording musicians release their own mixes without going to a mastering engineer
first, this issue on mixing is a great place to dive into the where, how, and why of keeping your metadata.

Metatags

Simply put, metadata is data about other data. In our case,
it's data about audio data. Metatags are how files embed this
metadata into themselves. This could be anything from the title
of a song to the format of a file. Audio file formats include various
types of metatags, and you'll want to fill in this data where
appropriate. We'll talk about what you'll need in a bit, but let's
start by talking about a couple of file types and their metatags.
WAV: WAV files are our most common uncompressed audio
format. Technically these files have metadata in them, but it's all
technical data about the file (more on that in an upcoming
article), and nothing you want to mess with. From our point
of view, WAV files contain no extra data. Don't confuse this
figure 1

with the metadata that gets amended to a Red Book CDDA file,
which is the way CD players know things like song title and artist
name. This data is stored in the Red Book file, not in the WAV itself.
MP3: MP3 is currently the most common compressed format,
which is usually how we deliver downloads to fans
and associates. MP3's ubiquitous nature may change in favor
of newer formats, but probably not soon, and since MP3
files carry so much useful metadata, they're great for getting
the concept down. There are a couple of different metadata
formats associated with MP3-ID3v1 and ID3v2-but we
needn't concern ourselves with that right now. What's important
right now is what data we need.
Others: Many other audio file formats exist for audio,
including AIFF, OGG, and FLAC. Some carry useful
metadata and some don't. We'll be diving into file formats in
more depth in a later piece, so for now, let's stick to the basic
concepts and use MP3 as our basic guide.

What you need-and why

So what data do we want to associate with a song? Obviously
the title and artist name would be a good start, but there's a
lot more than that. To start to understand what you really want
to embed in a file, you'll need to think about the purpose of
the recording. There are a few potential purposes-you might
be selling the tracks to fans, you might be giving the tracks
away for promotion, and/or you might be using the tracks for
business-to-business transactions such as licensing.
That last scenario is the critical one. When you pitch a track
to an agent or a music supervisor, there's a wealth of information
they will need in order to make it easy to potentially use the
song. Fortunately, some of it is the same stuff you want your
fans to have, and all of it also serves the purpose of creating
a professional look and feel to your work.
With that in mind, let's look at some information from the
extended MP3 standard that we might want. The table in red
on the facing page lists some common metatags.
Title, Artist and Album are pretty self-explanatory. If your
song has a featured artist, put that in the title, not the artist!
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RECORDING September 2017

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - September 2017