Music Discussions

A few weeks ago I suggested subscribing to Last.fm’s podcast of recommended free music. If you use iTunes, you can get even benefit from this service by downloading two no cost programs: Mp3tag and MixMeister BPM Analyzer.

When songs are downloaded into iTunes through a podcast, they appear in the the "Podcasts" section of the iTunes library instead of the "Music" section. However, by using Mp3tag you can remedy this and have all of your music listed in the same area.

First copy the mp3 files from the "Podcasts" folder (which is in your "iTunes Music" folder) to a temporary folder somewhere on your computer. Next select all of the files that you just copied and right click on the group. Then select "Mp3tag" from the drop-down menu. When Mp3tag comes up, click on the first song in the list and press Alt+t to bring up the tags for that file. Select "ITUNESPODCAST", "ITUNESPODCASTDESC", "ITUNESPODCASTID", and "ITUNESPODCASTURL" and press the delete key on your keyboard; this will delete the tags that indicate to iTunes that the files are podcasts.

Upon closing the program your files will be treated as normal mp3s, however they will not be automatically reimported into iTunes. Before we do this, it would be a good idea to open MixMeister BPM Analyzer and drag the files to it; that way you will be able to organize your music by beats per minute to create track lists for workouts, parties, car trips, or whatever. I have also published a formula and online utility to calculate personalized workout bpms for those who are interested. After MixMeister has finished running, you may close it as its changes are automatically changed. Also, since only the tags are changed, the file is not reencoded so you will not suffer any audio quality loss.

Now on to the final part: importing your music into the correct folder. In iTunes, select "Ad Folder to Library…" from the "File" menu. When prompted for the folder, select the folder that you placed your modified mp3s in. After making sure that the files have been imported correctly, you can go to the "Podcasts" portion of your library in iTunes and remove all of the files since they are now listed under "Music". Also, unless you have changed the default setting, iTunes copies music files to its own library folder so you can remove the files from the temporary folder.

I do not have a Mac, so I am unable to list equivalent programs to Mp3tag and MixMeister or instructions relating to where the files are stored; if you have tips for Macs please post them (or a link to them) in the comments. Also, I have not tried Mp3tag or MixMeister on Linux under Wine. I do not anticipate any issues with these, and iTunes is a much more complicated program and runs under Wine. However, Linux has utilities for performing these same tasks and there is a good chance that you have tagging editing on your system already. The other steps should be the same as Wine mimics the Windows file structure.