Smart use of MP3 tags

[Mojito]

I use a Sansa MP3 player with 4GB capacity. This thing is very small, with a tiny TINY screen. Long names have to scroll horizontally. Internally, it organizes things based on their ID3 tags. Having the "album" tag of hundreds of files all say "JapanesePod101.com _ Basic Feed" is not very useful in finding things. Your company name is already in the "Artist" tag.

I have been changing the "Album" tags by hand, which is getting tedious. If you sent them out coded in the first place, to indicate which lesson collection they belong in, that would be a big help. I have been using names like
J Beginner
J Lo Intermediate
J Newbie
and so on.

If you did this, and then also removed the collection name from the start of each "title" tag, it would be easier for those of us with tiny screens to find things. So an item with a title of "Beginner Lesson #87 - Reunion III - Audio" would instead be "#87 Reunion III" with an Album tag of "J Beginner" and so on.

I put the "J" on the front to distinguish them from the musical albums. Anything short will do, but please not "Japanesepod101.com". That all by itself fills the screen from left to right. The idea is to be able to find the album I want without waiting for the useful part of the name to scroll into view.

[ShiroiNeko]

I use a Sansa MP3 player with 4GB capacity. This thing is very small, with a tiny TINY screen. Long names have to scroll horizontally. Internally, it organizes things based on their ID3 tags. Having the "album" tag of hundreds of files all say "JapanesePod101.com _ Basic Feed" is not very useful in finding things. Your company name is already in the "Artist" tag.

I have been changing the "Album" tags by hand, which is getting tedious. If you sent them out coded in the first place, to indicate which lesson collection they belong in, that would be a big help. I have been using names like
J Beginner
J Lo Intermediate
J Newbie
and so on.

If you did this, and then also removed the collection name from the start of each "title" tag, it would be easier for those of us with tiny screens to find things. So an item with a title of "Beginner Lesson #87 - Reunion III - Audio" would instead be "#87 Reunion III" with an Album tag of "J Beginner" and so on.

I put the "J" on the front to distinguish them from the musical albums. Anything short will do, but please not "Japanesepod101.com". That all by itself fills the screen from left to right. The idea is to be able to find the album I want without waiting for the useful part of the name to scroll into view.

Mojito,

I agree with you that use of tags could be considerably improved. I have found that I have needed to check every single lesson that arrives - not only to change the album and titles to something more useful and visible ( I used a Sansa, now an iTouch ) but also to make sure that genres are OK. Sometimes these can also differ. I have had lessons downloaded as "other" "podcast", even "rock" and "blues" !!

I have found that using Windows Media Player is a quick way to keep all the tags updated. If you keep lessons in different folders, eg. Lesson type and season, you can use advanced tag editor to copy tags from a prior lesson, to new lessons, multiple lessons at once.

I have renamed all my lessons to start with an eight character code - this worked very well on the Sansa

Example: B1-004-A
Beginner Lesson, Season 1, Lesson 4, Main lesson

Last letter is changed as follows, as required.
R - Review track
D - Dialog
G - Grammar
B - Bonus

Fiercecat o o 0 O ( Hiss, Ftt )