Appreciating Metadata Through Music
Metadata is one of the more important aspects of data management, yet many data professionals do not understand or simply ignore metadata management. Consider, for example, the metadata that you must manage on your iPod—or whatever MP3 player you use—to be able to successfully select the music you want to hear.
Why is metadata so important for MP3s? Accurate and up-to-date metadata makes the MP3 experience more enjoyable. What type of metadata? Well, most people want to know the song name and probably the artist performing the song. This information—this metadata—makes the music on your device accessible by some means other than random playing.
Think about the metadata you need before you go about downloading music. At a bare minimum you’ll want the artist and song name, and you will probably also want to know the album name the song is from, especially if you want to be able to listen to entire albums on your iPod. The next piece of metadata you’ll likely want is one of the most vexing to get: genre of music. At least, it has been troublesome for me.
Why? Well, the term is not rigorously defined. Is there a difference between Rock and Hard Rock? What about Hard Rock and Heavy Metal? Do you want to slice the genre even finer so that you’d have Thrash Metal, Death Metal, Rap Metal, Hardcore, and maybe even Hair Metal? It might make all the difference in the world to you if you are a metal fan. Or, would you classify Led Zeppelin, Judas Priest, Poison, and Slayer all as simply Heavy Metal? Or maybe you don’t care enough about metal music at all, so you’d classify anything even remotely metal-ish simply as Hard Rock … or maybe just Rock.
Perhaps the biggest contributor to getting all that metadata into your iPod will be the online music database Gracenote (www.gracenote.com/music). Most digital music software relies on the Gracenote database to automatically populate musical metadata. Gracenote automatically identifies the CD based on its content (and almost always gets it right). It automatically populates the artist, title, recording name, and other metadata fields so you don’t have to.
If you are a stickler for accuracy, like me, Gracenote might at times annoy you (even though you’d never do without it). For example, one of the things I like is consistency.
