Time to Rethink Tagging Music

I try to take pretty good care of my music collection. I've got 7,220 files in my iTunes library, which is just barely too much for my 30 gig iPod. No "Unknown Artist - Track 1" for me; I do a pretty good job tagging my songs. I may be a little lax on album titles (or take some liberties with Greatest Hits albums for the sake of organization), but I'll usually hit up MusicBrainz to double check track number, song titles and artist, etc.

I'm not the best or most thorough, nor do I have the biggest collection out there, but I like what I have, and I like being able to find songs in a way that makes sense to me and hopefully makes sense to whoever's controlling my iPod in the passenger seat of my car. It's imperfect, though; my biggest complaint is that I can only file songs under one artists' name. Usually, I'll defer to MusicBrainz, but consider the "Sum 41 Rock Remix" of Ludacris' "Get Back." I want that song to come up alongside my other Sum 41 songs, so it's filed with Sum 41 as the artist instead of Ludacris. And I think of "Under Pressure" as being by "Queen & David Bowie," not one or the other (and for once MusicBrainz agrees), so I have an Artist listing for "Queen & David Bowie" that contains only that song.

When looking for a solution to this problem, the closest I could find was over at the excellent site LifeHacker. A few months back there was a discussion of tag-cloud-style music tags, but specifically in the sense of sorting songs by the moods and emotions they evoke. The best solution offered for that problem was what I do anyway - I make a lot of playlists, and they're usually several hundred songs long. I use playlists to function as a "controlled random" - making sure I don't get any Dropkick Murphys when I'm trying to sleep, or any Mozart while I'm driving. Effectively, I'm tagging my music almost like I tag my emails in Gmail, with playlists serving the same purpose as labels. The only thing I took away from the discussion at LifeHacker was the idea of adding codewords to the "Comment" field of the ID3 tag, so that the playlist sorting would stay with the song.

For those who've never really looked into it, ID3 tags are a bit of information (actually, up to 256MB of information) contained in the MP3 file. According to Wikipedia, the concept of ID3 was born in 1996, a year after the first MP3 encoding software went public (the letters .mp3 were chosen to be the file extension 13 years ago today (July 14, 1995)). The first version of the tags, ID3v1, used a limited character set and couldn't even handle some songs' full titles if they were too long or used certain punctuation marks or foreign characters. ID3v2 tags have increased character limits, as well as new fields to hold album art, bitrate, and other pieces of information about the song. A lot of music organizers advertise themselves as "ID3v3" but according to ID3.org, there hasn't been a new standard since ID3v2.4 was proposed in November of 2000 (and even that hasn't fully taken hold due to "some disagreements on some of the revisions and the tremendous inertia present in the software and hardware marketplace.").

But I think it's time for a new version of ID3. ID3 is still stuck in a "Windows 98"-era mindset of folder-organization. That era has passed, and Flickr/del.icio.us/Gmail-style tagging is the way we now need to sort our information. I shouldn't have to attribute a song to one artist when 3 or 4 artists contribute to the track. I should be able to select an artist from the Artists list and see every song they've performed on, as a headliner or in a featuring role. And a playlist should be a list of songs to be played in order, not a workaround for music sorting.

Of course, I don't know if that's feasible practically. And I don't know how to program it. My plea to those who are better with computers than I am - give us an ID3v3 for the Web 2.0 crowd and a media player that can read it. Don't do it for me; do it for Lil Wayne and the 77 tracks he appeared on in 2007.

...and while we're at it, who else thinks that alphabetical order might be obsolete in a digital world?