Five O’Clock Shadow 31

Five O'Clock Shadow 31

Originally uploaded by evo_terra.

As I bust my ass writing another Practice in Expert Podcasting Practices for Dummies (since I'm really, really behind), I thought I'd talk about the two most underused ID3 tags. And by underused I mean "no one is using them but me".

First, the "grouping" tag. If you run a podcast network, association or band of idiots waving a common flag, this tag is the PERFECT place to brand the name of your association. Why? Well even though it's not one of the default displayed tags in iTunes, it's easily enabled and will allow your collective audience to group all of your network's shows together. Yeah. It's that cool. As long as everyone uses the same tag, obviously. And yes, we ask that all the authors on Podiobooks.com use "Podiobooks.com" as the grouping. Now you know why.

Lastly, the "compilation" tag. This little check box is super groovy to use if you are prohibited from keeping a consistent "artist" tag for all of your episodes. Maybe you do a short story podcast and use the "artist" field to add the original author of the story. Maybe you feature three songs from the same musician or band in the same file and like to include their name in this tag. Great. Go ahead. But know that it makes it nigh impossible to find the actual files in the directory structure of your listeners system -- especially if they use iTunes. But if you check the "compilations" box in your ID3 tagging software, all of them are automatically grouped together by the name of the Album (which should be the name of your podcast.) That makes it super easy to grab all of them and burn them to an archive CD.

Hey, I'm here to help.