QUESTION ABOUT "TAGS"

[Avagadro1]

Questions Regarding “TAGS”

I am new to new to Media Monkey and digital music generally. I’ve just spent several weeks ripping my CDs to WAV files; I also downloaded a few files in FLAC format. Much time has been spent downloading and/or manually entering correct artist, album, song, date and related data into Media Monkey.

It is my understanding that the information downloaded from the Internet or manually entered into Media Monkey somehow becomes a “TAG” for the particular music file, which, in turn, thereafter identifies that file and presents the data whenever Media Monkey is opened.

Three brief questions:

1) Are such TAGS the same as “metadata”, a term I’ve also heard?

2) Is a TAG somehow imbedded in the music file itself, or in a separate Media Monkey database? The answer goes to the heart of another question: what happens if I purchase a new computer or install a new hard drive such that I have to download a fresh version of Media Monkey? Is all my work gone(!)? If not, i.e., if all the data again populates the correct cells in Media Monkey, then the TAGS must have been imbedded in the music file itself.

3) Are such TAGS proprietary to Media Monkey, or are they common, identifiable and useable by any digital media player? In other words, if the music (WAV) files on my hard drive were imported into the library of another digital media player, would the title, artist, date and other data appear in the “correct” cells?

Thank you.

[MPG]

1)I would say that tags and metadata is one and the same. Tags contain the title, artist, album, Genre, Track Number, Album Cover, and a variety of other data on that particular song. All of those tags become the metadata.

2) Yes, the tags are stored in the header of the file which Mediamonkey, Windows Media Player, Winamp, and 99.99% of the other players are able to read.

3) I think my answer to question #2 answers this question.

A quick reminder that you can use the Web Lookup to automatically look up the Tag information for songs. Press Ctrl+L.

Good luck and welcome to MediaMonkey!

MPG

[Lowlander]

2 & 3 see: http://www.mediamonkey.com/wiki/index.p ... erties/4.0