In the move to digital 1, and particularly with streaming, the musicians who play on recordings are rarely given credit outside of AllMusic or Wikipedia. A PDF of the liner notes might mention personnel, but I don’t know of any download or streaming service that embeds such information in tracks. For MP3, there is a standard in place for such metadata — ID3 has the TMCL and TIPL for tagging files with personnel credits. There are Apple namespaced equivalents for MP4 (AAC) files. I’ve long used the Comments field for this purpose, but it suffers from limited character length and lack of structure. The only software I’ve found that supports TMCL and TIPL with an interface designed for their input is a Windows application called ID3TagIt. Not wanting to fire up a virtual machine to use an app which has not been updated since 2006, it would be great to see support in Metadatics 2. Currently, it handles musician credits only as raw text:
I’d like to see a UI for inputting credits:
The menu button at the right of the name field would give you access to commands to remove the person, the instrument or role, or add another person with the same instrument or role.
Providing a field for the Lyricist would also be nice:
Of course, this is pointless if playback software doesn’t provide some way to use this metadata. I want to be able to start a stream of songs with lyrics by Stevie Wonder, or create a Smart Playlist with all recordings of Pino Palladino on bass. Unfortunately, Apple seems to have lost interest in expanding iTunes’ metadata support and Spotify and Rdio have only the most basic track metadata.
For more social- and personal experience-oriented ideas for music metadata 3, read Khoi Vinh’s What Streaming Music Can Be.
Footnotes
- Note that I am not a retro-tech nostalgist. Not every LP sounds amazing, they wear out, and they are not the least bit portable.
- Licensed! It’s only $10.00.
- Some of which are similar to Last.fm.
