Want to set your podcast “genre” tag to “Podcast” and “album” tag to the name of the show? No problem.
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 February 21st, 2006