Portable Fiasco

I had just downloaded a bunch of MP3 files from 3hive.com, and I queued them all up in WinAmp to listen to while I surfed elsewhere. Some of them were OK, some of them were no good.

Then one came on that I really liked. Slow, sad, folky stuff, the essence of Autumn distilled. Eager to hear more, I looked to see who the singer was.

But I couldn't tell.

The name of the file (selected by the website, not by me) was "DontBeSoMeanJe...mp3.mp3", which is clearly mangled and not much help.

photo cheerfully swiped without permission from justinrutledge.com

Those of us familiar with MP3 files know that they can be (and usually are) tagged with metadata, like the song name, artist name, year recorded, etc. WinAmp can show you that information with the handy "View file info..." option. But no luck; this MP3 file was not tagged.

I went back to 3hive.com and read the titles of the recently-posted songs, looking for a likely suspect. The track turned out to be "Don't Be So Mean, Jellybean," by Justin Rutledge.

So I found what I was looking for, in the end. That's good. But what if things had gone differently? What if I hadn't been able to listen to it right away - would it have been so easy to figure out where it came from? What if I had put this track, along with hundreds of other collected-from-the-web tracks, onto an iPod and gone on a road trip? What if I had e-mailed the track to a friend? How would my friend find out what it was?

Sadly, this is common. In fact, it seems to me that legal music giveaways downloaded from music blogs of all descriptions are actually much less likely to have accurate and useful filenames and metadata than illegal material is.

This bugs me. It's hardly an Earth-shattering issue. It's probably not even a music-business-shattering issue. But it's so obviously in the music vendor's best interest to get this right, and it's easy to get it right - yet it's done wrong all the time. Naming and tagging the file correctly are basic usability issues, but beyond that, they make it easy for interested people to find out more about the music in question. Isn't that the whole point of giving away music for free?

So the lessons for today are:

1. Name your files well.
2. If the file format you're using supports metadata, use it.
3. Listen to "Don't Be So Mean, Jellybean."