what benefit do I get from having so much tags in my music files?

[CANcOnANDsoNVIL]

so I was using audioranger to auto-download tags into my collection when I inspect the files, it inserts a lot of tags into the files. At the moment, my music files has barebones (artist, album artists, genre, track no and title)

 

what sort of benefit do I get from such information? Is this information used by software? thanks

this screenshot was taken using foobar2000.

 

[krass]

23 hours ago, CANcOnANDsoNVIL said:

…..Is this information used by software?

…..

 

 

if you mean “can it be read by software & presented to the end-user” then the answer is yes.. depending on which “player” you use (some present more, some less…)

 

if you mean “is it read by the software & used to alter/ modify the music” then the answer should be no. 

 

It’s just metadata that can be used to “improve” the user experience but, as I said, it depends on which player you’re using as to which if any are extracted & presented

(as example, your player may have a button called “Artists website”. For the track you’ve shown, it would take you to Norah Jones’ website which supposedly improves your user experience).

[stefano_mbp]

@CANcOnANDsoNVIL … depends on tags, in your screenshot many seem unusable as they are hexadecimal strings, but if tags are “intelligent” you can have great results using the right sw (ie Minimserver)

this is an example of my Lumïn app “homepage” where every entry is a browsable index

[Dan Gravell]

Personally I'm more of a minimalist - mo' metadata, mo' problems...

 

Try to constrain tags to the minimum you need, plus immutable fields that won't change. So that's basic titles, identifier fields (e.g. MB IDs) and structural ones (that describe each track's position in its wider release).

[paultaylor]

As stefano says if you are using something like MinimServer you can configure it to browse by any metadata field, allowing you to navigate by that item (e.g Orchestra, Label, conductor, instrument... ). If using a regular music player such as Winamp then it is more difficult to make use of this metadata, but sort fields are very useful for sensibly ordering your artists etc and supported by most music players.

 

Also if your music tagger stores identification fields such as MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMID that means it knows where the metadata has originally come from, and allows it to have options to update metadata from a source rather than have to rematch it. We do this in SongKong and Jaikoz, it also allows us to do intelligent duplicate file finding based on reliable identifiers rather than basic metadata.