Want to set your podcast “genre” tag to “Podcast” and “album” tag to the name of the show? No problem.
February 21st, 2006
Background
So I am trying to use WMP to Sync my Podcasts and Yahoo Unlimited Subscription music to my new Windows PPC phone (VX 6700). First of all WMP lacks in the syncing arena compared to iTunes, but it is a step above the slow and buggy Yahoo Music Player Software which for me has been nothing but a bad experience. The short of the story is I finally found some decent Podcast download/management software (Juice aka iPodder) and have been using it to get my podcasts into a directory that WMP is monitoring (My Music\My Podcasts). download Juice/iPodder here
iPodder/Juice does a real good job of downloading and saving the podcasts in a nice directory structure and then also create playlists for each show within WMP. Great so far..Unfortunately, the ID3 tags saved by the podcasters for the most part are in bad shape.. for instance, most of the podcasts don’t save the show name as the Album variable and almost none of them saved the genre as “Podcast”. This is annoying in WMP because I cannot filter my Podcasts by genre, but it really gets bad once they copy over to my phone.. Mobile WMP 10 is hard enough to navigate via a phone interface without not being able to easily get to the podcasts via album name or genre..
So I found a post on the Juice forums that led me to id3 mass tagger, a great little program by squell. After playing around with id3 MT and Juice, I finally got my Juice setup working to where when a podcast auto or manually downloads it will add the show name as the Album and make the genre “Podcast”. download id3 mass tagger
How does it work?
Basically, Juice will call a little cmd file I wrote that in turn calls id3 MT. As Juice finishes a podcast download and saves it to a directory, it can be set to call another program - so I set it to call the cmd wrapper which takes the podcast show name and file location as parameters. The cmd calls id3 MT twice to make sure to hit both ID3v1 and v2 tags..
Just tell me how to fix my ID3 tags with Juice…
1. Download the zip file attached to this post. download ID3 Fix for Podcasts Zip File
2. Copy the files id3.exe and fixgenre.cmd from the zip file into your c:\windows\system32 or c:\windows directory (or any directory that will allow them to be accessed via commandline from anywhere.. if anyone knows what directory Juice “runs from” when it is trying to run cmd line .exe’s please email me..)
3. Open up Juice and under “File” > “Preferences” > “Advanced”:
4. Make sure “Run this command after each download” is checked.
5. In the field below the checkbox type: fixgenre "%f" "%n"
That’s it - now when you download new podcasts, it should fix them up!
Not using iPodder?
You can still use id3 MT with or without the fixgenre.cmd to fix your podcasts manually and en masse. Open the fixgenre.cmd file to get a idea of the syntax to use with id3 MT to fix the podcasts.
-Raskawa
7 Comments Add your own
1. MIke | March 30th, 2006 at 7:03 pm
Great advice. Unfortunately, the links to id3 MT are not working. I found links for a Linux/Debian version on SoftPedia, but can’t locate the windows version.
2. TerraKat | April 2nd, 2006 at 9:27 pm
Thanks for the great advice! I have extended this a little further. I use Windows Media Player and generally like it to move my files according to the artist/album etc, but I didn’t want it to do this for podcasts because it makes them harder to find and Juice then shows them as Removed all the time. To get round this, I’ve added the line
attrib +r %1to the end of your fixgenre.cmd. This makes each file read-only which prevents Media Player from moving it. Juice shows the files as being present, but unfortunately can’t ‘clean them up’ without you first clearing the read-only flag (or just deleting the file manually).3. Raskawa | April 3rd, 2006 at 10:34 am
Hey Mike,
I just double checked the link and it seems to be working. Here is squell’s site: http://home.wanadoo.nl/squell/id3.html
For windows you want to download the “Win32 console binary”
4. Tom | April 17th, 2006 at 12:23 am
Thanks for this advice. It dealing with my podcasts much easier!
5. Patrick McNeal | April 29th, 2006 at 1:02 pm
Thanks for the tip! This is exactly what I’ve been wanting.
6. Doug | August 29th, 2006 at 10:02 pm
How to use ID3Fix without copying files into the Windows directory: All you’re doing is putting it in Window’s path, right? To avoid the need, just use absolute paths in your commands. Weirdly, Juice does not seem to handle paths with spaces, like “C:\Program Files\…” (even when quoted), so be sure to use the 8dot3 version of the filenames.
In short:
1. In the Juice preferences, use this command:
C:\Progra~1\id3\fixgenre.cmd “%f” “%n”
2. And in the fixgenre.cmd file, use these:
C:\Progra~1\id3\id3 -v -2 -g Podcast -l %2 %1
C:\Progra~1\id3\id3 -v -1 -g Podcast -l %2 %1
Thanks for tool; works great!
7. Will | September 5th, 2006 at 1:30 am
Thanks for sharing. Very useful.
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