» How should MP3 files be tagged for podcasts? | Berlind’s Midnight Oil | ZDNet.com

I don’t blog much about podcasting here, I do enough of that at The New, New Podcast Review, but this post from David Berlind is interesting enough to warrant a comment and different enough from what I typically post at TNNPR that I decided to put it here.

David puts forth a highly cogent argument for consistent ID3 tagging for podcasts. I’m been ranting about some of this for a while now, but only upon reviewing that particular rant just now did I realize that I’ve come some way with my thinking but haven’t modified my rant to match.

One thing I’ve been going on about in the review at TNNPR is the lack of a date in the track name. As David says, having the date available makes a huge difference to the user experience for me, especially when listening on a portable player. The only modification I’d make to the example in David’s screenshot is that I want the date in ISO 8601 (YYYY-MM-DD) format because it sorts appropriately in the file system. This is more consistent with David’s textual example.

I’ve come to believe that I’m wrong about what I wrote about the podcast name in the track name, and in fact I like David’s example - I want some minimal description of content in that meta-data. That is, of course, assuming that the podcast channel name is in the album field (as David suggests), which means that I can play only selections from that podcast if that’s what I want to hear. As far as artist goes, I once again agree with David that I want something consistent that reflects the creator of the podcast, not the content.

One place I disagree with David is in the difference between file-name and track-name. I’d like to see those be as identical as possible. Most podcatching software that I’ve seen automagically organizes the mp3s into folders in the filesystem based on the feed it came from, so something generic like the podcast channel name isn’t necessary int he filename and isn’t tremendously useful data. And sometimes, when I want to sync a few podcasts with my portable it’s helpful to have the same name data in the filesystem that I’ve seen in my desk-bound media player.

David; thanks for bringing this to the forefront and giving it some attention (or should that be Attention?). Hopefully podcasters will listen.