by G M Burkart

Created on: November 08, 2008

Audacity, the Free and Open Source audio editing software suite, is widely known, loved, and used by thousands of audio designers, musicians, and hobbyists worldwide. Its strengths include a feature set comparable to nearly any proprietary consumer-grade audio software, and even several professional-grade audio editing suites that would otherwise cost users hundreds of dollars. Cross-platform and format-flexible, MP3 and other formats common to digital audio players are among the standard formats Audacity supports by default.

ID3 tags are incredibly useful tags of metadata embedded in audio files. Without them, your favorite audio program or MP3 player would only know the filenames of all the files in your music library. It would be an incredibly hassle to build playlists by band, by title, by length, or by genre. In fact, all of this information would have to be encoded in the filename itself, which would make it nearly human-unreadable. Furthermore, older operating systems impose a character limit on filenames, which further limits the data space available.

Whether you have your own audio files to encode with ID3 tags, or wish to fill in additional or missing data for files you already have, Audacity makes it easy to add and edit ID3 metadata tags. We'll look at two methods: simple editing and template editing.

SIMPLE EDITING

(1) Launch Audacity from the desktop shortcut (all OS), the Applications Menu (Windows XP, Vista, and many flavors of Linux), or the Dock or Applications folder (OSX).

(2) File -> Open... and select the audio file you wish to edit. Alternatively, drag the audio file onto the desktop shortcut or Dock icon.

(3) File -> Open Metadata Editor... to open the ID3 Tag editing window.

(4) Edit each field as needed. The fields available should be as follows: Artist Name, Track Title, Album Title, Track Number, Year, Genre, and Comments.

[4.1] If you don't know what to enter for any field, it's better to leave it blank.

[4.2] Feel free to edit the "Genres" database for your own purposes. To do so, click the "Edit" button in the lower left hand section of the window titled "Genres". To clear out all your custom edits, click "Reset".

(5) Click OK to finish editing and close the window

(6) File -> Save to save your audio file, complete with the new and updated ID3 tags. Either quit Audacity or open another audio file, because that's all you need to do!

TEMPLATE EDITING

Why might you want to use a template? If you're authoring your own CD, or need to fill

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