How to Properly Tag and Label your Mixes using ID3 Tags

There’s nothing worse than downloading a mix from someone off the internet called mixdown_rendered_v2.mp3. It’ll at best sit on my hard drive until I get the time to play it and try and guess who the fuck did it, let alone what tracks are on the mix or at worse be deleted along with my temp files. Additional to that, you upload it to your MP3 player and it disappears quicker than a fart in a hurricane!

I’m here to tell you it doesn’t have to be this way, using a few free tools on the internet and Photoshop you could make the difference from your mix temporarily living on my desktop to being archived and stuck on my pod/car! This tutorial will not deal with podcasting, mastering, finalising mixes or discuss what’s better, MP3 or vinyl, just explain how to prepare your fresh phat mix for upload.

I’ve split this tutorial into sections, easiest parts first, moving onto more fiddly or time consuming elements towards the rear. I’ve assumed your doing all this on a PC, because it’s where I do it. My macbook is pretty much a DJ only tool and I don’t have any ID3 tagging apps running on it. Feel free to let me know otherwise.

What File Format Shall I Distribute my DJ Mixes In?! WMA, FLAC, MP3

It’s a war out there, and there a lot of formats that you could possibly encode your mix as. Personally I do the following:

1. Once I’ve done my mix, I trim it using Audacity or Cool Edit Pro, removing any space at the beginning and if need be fading out the end nicely. This file is then saved as a WAV file. It’s basically CD quality, and no matter how many times you open, edit and re-save it you wont lose quality. The file will be around 700MB for a 60 minute mix, and with terabytes of data storage coming down in price daily, this wont cause a problem archiving it.
2. Once I am happy I export a copy as an MP3, taking care to set the encoding resolution to at least 192KBps (ideally 320KBps) Joint Stereo and at a Constant Bit Rate (CBR for short). Variable bit rates can cause a few hiccups when re-using them in applications like Ableton. I like to keep all these files in one directory. It means I can archive the lot off to DVD or another location if I need to, and everything will be kept together.

I never bother with WMA, I know they’re smaller but you’re seriously limiting your audience if you ask me. Fuck it’s hard enough trying to convince your nearest and dearest to listen to a mix, let alone some half naked fat dude surfing a forum in another country!

Other formats are out there, and the only other one I’d seriously consider is FLAC as it’s got the quality and loss-less features of WAV but with the benefits of a smaller file size. It’s not so well supported and you need to install special DLLs for things like iTunes and WinAmp to get it to play… for the noobs I say leave well alone and stick to 320KBps or 192KBps MP3s! Flac is defo for the chin strokers and golden ears out there!

Getting off on the Right Foot – Properly Naming the MP3 File

Before you do anything, it’s best to label the MP3 file properly, before we go off and do the advanced stuff. Naming the file, gives people a fighting chance to find the mix via Google.com or on their PC and can search using either your DJ name or the mix name. Remember there’s loads of us out there, it could be a mix by EvilKeg or even Evil Nine! Personally I label mine roughly following this format:

20090214 - EvilKeg - EvilKeg's McLoving Breakbeat Promo Mix (2009).mp3

I put the date as Year Month Day at the beginning so that if someone downloads all my mixes to a folder they’ll be able to see at a glance which is my most recent, and they can build a collection of them all. If it just ends up on the desktop, at least they know what the file is and where it came from.

It also allows you to see at a glance when the last time you did one! Also I use spaces in the file name, most operating systems can now handle this so if yours doesn’t you may want to think about upgrading from Windows 3.1!

Labelling the MP3 fields accurately using ID3 Tags

It’s not an art form, it’s actually quite simple, and I tend to first off do this in a text document using Notepad, you can see at a glance what the details are and it’s easy to search and replace etc. It also means you can then use this info web posting on web pages to promote the mix. I frequently save this file and once you’ve got one, you’ll have a decent template to work from next time… like this is gonna be the only mix you ever post?!

Running Notepad

• Click on Start

• Click on Run

• Type notepad and then press enter

You can use the following as a basic template, and fill in what you can:

Title: YYYYMMDD – Mixname
Artist: Your DJ Name
Album: YYYYMMDD – Mixname
Year: 2009
Genre: Beat, House etc – please dont just put alternative it’s a cop out!
Comment: yourdomain.com
This, the the third in our UKBCD series of mixes. This mix features a wide plethora of breaks with a smidgen of booty bass for good measure. Some of the tracks are ones that I really wanted to put on a mix before Christmas, but didn’t have a chance… if you like it, why not visit ukbeatcartel.com for more of the same!

UKBCD003: EvilKeg’s Breaks and Bassline Tuna Track-listing

01 – Smoove Turrell – I Cant Give You Up [A Skillz Remix]
.

. cropped for example…

.
14 – X-MEN vs LFO – Freak

Please support the artists!
Album Artist: Your DJ Name
Composer: Your DJ Name
Original Artist: Various Artists
Copyright: All work on this mix is the property of the original copyright holders. All rights reserved.
Disc #: 1

Once you have the above information save the file as we’re now going to paste this info into the required fields in WinAmp. Ikeep it as a document, so it can be used as the foundation for any forum posts later.

Labelling Using ID3v1 MP3 Tags

The ID3v1 tag occupies 128 bytes, beginning with the string TAG. The tag was placed at the end of the file to maintain compatibility with older media players. Some players would play a small burst of static when they read the tag, but most ignored it, and almost all modern players will correctly skip it. This tag allows 30 bytes for the title, artist, album, and a “comment”, four bytes for the year, and a byte to identify the genre of the song from a predefined list of 80 values (Winamp later extended this list to 148 values).

One improvement to ID3v1 was made by Michael Mutschler in 1997. Since the comment field was too small to write anything useful, he decided to trim it by two bytes and use it to store the track number. Such tags are referred to as ID3v1.1.

I now briefly label my tracks in the ID3v1 field and fully label it using the ID3v2 field. You’ll need to either keep the mix titles short, or accommodate for this somehow. Don’t change the mix name, etc!

Labelling Using ID3v2 MP3 Tags

ID3v2 tags are a hell of a lot nicer, and allows you to store a lot more data. In my text document mentioned above I type up all the text I am going to need, then past in what I can where I can in the two sets of tags. Just make sure your fields are as similar as possible to the ID3v1 tags, to save confusion!

Creating an Album Artwork for Cover Flow

Back in the day of CDs, tapes and vinyl, presentation was a big part of the product. People took the time to creat album covers and records had sleeve artwork representative of the release. Not many people know that this is also possible with MP3. OK, you can’t feel or pick them up, but at least it’s “packaged” somewhat and gives a visual representation of your mix.

If you’re a dab hand with photoshop, then this wont be a problem for you and your creative juices will be flowing right now, thinking of ideas to reflect your mix. If on the other hand you’re new to all this graphics malarky, then you need to ensure that your image has the who, what, why, where and when:

• Your DJ name – Make sure you spel it right! (The Who)

• Your mix name – Maybe include a genre hint here or an occasion (The What and the Why)

• A nice picture or background – just for the back ground, make it a little interesting to look at, plus your listener will associate a picture better than just a load of words. Check clip art and photo sites if you’re not keen on making an image yourself. Dont forget to layer the text on top ina contrasting colour so people can read it!

• Your web address/myspace etc – If you have one… If you haven’t come speak to me (The Where)
• The Date – Your listeners want to know that this is not from two years ago, and alternatively someone in years to come might want to listen to a nostalgia mix from right now (The When)

• Other contact details – Email, telephone, fax, it’s all good – you want bookings don’t you?!

Uploading Your DJ Mixes to the Internet

MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 or MP3 or as it’s normally referred to is already a compressed file and will be around 130-300MB in size. Zipping or raring the archive is a waste of time as the disc space saving is negligible and only means that your listener won’t be able to immediately listen to your mix without an extra process.They could be downloading your mix on a PDA or smart phone so make their life simple!

Zipping your DJ mix also means that listeners wont be able to stream the mix immediately if they have this facility. WinAmp and QuickTime allow this feature and it means you dont need to fully download a mix before listening to it.

Ideally you will have already sorted out a website for your online promotion. It’s not that much money these days to host a site, and I personally have two main sites; EvilKeg.co.uk and media.evilkeg.co.uk. I do this so that if I blow my bandwidth from people downloading my mixes (from the media site), my main site is not affected. This is a smart move because you don’t want to have people trying to find you on the internet and Google returning a dead site. Doing it with your own site will mean you will need to have an understanding of HTML, FTP and the like. Look out for a post about this at a later date.

If you don’t have a website, or the time to understand FTP etc, there are also a lot of online sites allowing you to upload large files, that they will store for a certain amount of time, or until a certain amount of downloads happen etc. You get a specific URL that you can then send people to, to download the mix. They might have to look at a few adverts or type in a few letters, but on the whole it’s not too much of a pain.

I’ve used SendSpace.com in the past and it seems OK, althought if a mix has not been downloaded in three months or so, it’ll simply be deleted and removed. If you can handle this then I reckon it’ll be fine for you. I tend to post  my mixes here first, with a link from my site, then when the majority of poeple have downloaded it, I provide a link from my own site (I do this to save bandwidth).

More and more people are starting to use Soundcloud.com or Mixcloud.com to store and distro their mixes. Both have their benefits but I prefer Soundcloud.com!

Promoting Your New Mix Online

This is where it gets exciting, people are not gonna just ask you if you have a recent mix. You need to whore yourself. It’s the only way to build exposure, and there are websites full of people begging to download fresh mixes. I personally use a few key forums; NuSkoolBreaks.co.uk, Brap.fm, DontStayIn.com, podOmatic (currently testing this one), PostBocks and SoundCloud, as well as the social sites; Facebook, MySpace and Twitter etc. Be careful posting on people’s walls on FaceBook and only do about 5-10 at a time… more about this on another post!

Get your mix out to as many places as possible (it’s all about distribution), treat each forum post as a little army soldier, helping push your cause, and don’t forget to ask people for feedback at the end of the post. It’s good to know what people liked and didn’t like. Also if people say they like it, why not suggest to them that they join your mailing list or FaceBook group?

I tend to create a notepad document with set text to post on each forum, and then paste this into all the sites I am currently hammering. Don’t forget to check back in a few days to see if there’s been any feedback, even if it’s just to post a little request for feedback. Don’t forget to listen to your listeners!

I make sure I include the following elements in my forum posts at the very least:

• My DJ name
• My mix name
• A detailed track-listing
• A copy of the album artwork
• A link to my site or the download location
• Any up and coming gigs

In this notepad document I create, I also have copies of the post with HTML tags (for MySpace etc), BBCode tags (for most forums), as well as a shortened 255 teaser post for sites like Facebook etc. I save this file as well, that means if I find a new forum location, I just fire up notepad, copy the required text and past it into the new post.

Keeping a favourites folder with forum post locations means that next time you do a mix you just click on each of the forums, paste the post and move onto the next. I keep my DJ mix locations in a favorites folder up to date, and any other time I am on the internet and I find a new location to post mixes, I register and activate an account with the site immediately. This means I already have a username and password to post next time.

Conclusion

I hope you found this interesting or at least a little bit useful. If you have any questions, feel free to email me. This is not a complete guide, but something that I thought worth writing down.