77: How to Tag Your Audio Files with ID3 Metadata (and Why You Absolutely Should)
If you don't know what metadata is, you don't want to skip this episode.
There are a lot of podcast editors and consultants who don't see the value of metadata, but I do.
Is it going to be the difference between your podcast being a huge success and not? No.
Is it a process that only takes a literal minute or two and potentially helps boost your website's SEO and helps some of your listeners out? Yes.
Take a listen to this quick episode to find out why I, unlike a lot of professionals in my space, think you should tag your podcast episode audio files with metadata and exactly how you can do that in the easiest and quickest way possible.
UPDATE: Since releasing this episode, it’s been discovered the ID3 tags/metadata don’t actually help as much with SEO as we in the industry originally thought. (You can learn more about the data behind this here.) However, for as quick as the process is, I do still tag all of my clients shows with ID3 tags for the other reasons mentioned in the episode and the fact that we don’t know how technology will evolve in the future. There could an app or service one day that does pull from the metadata so, it’s better to be safe than sorry.
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Transcript
Welcome to podcasting for coaches. I'm Britany Felix and I'm a podcast launch consultant who specializes in helping coaches and consultants utilize the power of podcasting as a way to build brand awareness and generate new leads for their business. I realize not every new coach or consultant can afford to hire someone to help launch their show. So I created this podcast as a way to guide you through the process of launching and utilizing your very own podcast to help you grow your business and reach a new audience of adoring followers and potential clients. If you're ready to get your voice and podcast out into the world, head over to podcasting for coaches.com. To learn more. In this episode, we are going to talk about tagging your audio files with metadata. Now, if you have no idea what metadata is, you may not understand the importance of this episode. So I'm going to go ahead and explain that first. Now, for those of you who are my age, so at least in your 30s, you probably remember the glory days of the 90s. And having actual CDs that we had for our music and audio books and things like that, whenever you put that CD into your car stereo or into your computer, to listen, it would have the information displayed, you will be able to know who the artist was, what the name of the song was, in your computer, it might even display the album artwork. And then it would also probably have if you didn't notice that a copyright notice or a composer and all of that as metadata. So adding this information to your audio files will help if somebody either a downloads the file to listen to offline outside of their device, which surprisingly, there are quite a few people that do this. Most people think well, I just listened to it inside my podcast app. So the information is already there. Why do I need to add this stuff? whenever I travel, I don't like to use my data. And my phone has very limited storage on itself, like on the actual device. So I download any podcast episodes that I want to listen to on flights or road trips to the SD card is in my phone. And then I just play it from the SD card in which case it does not play in my app, it just plays in the general music player on my phone. For podcasts that don't add this metadata, it drives me insane, because once I download it, especially if they don't name the file with the title of the episode, I have no idea what file is what I listened to the podcast and Nerdist. And they are notorious for this. The file names are just a bunch of letters and numbers, it's gibberish. And they don't add metadata, which kills me because I know they have a ton of money to put towards our broadcast. So whenever I download a whole bunch of interviews, because I want to check out whatever guests, I have no idea who's who. So I have to like play the episode skip through the frickin 1015 minutes worth of ads just to figure out who the guest is. And if I actually want to listen to that episode, at that time. So please don't frustrate your listeners like that. Adding metadata can be super quick once you get efficient with it. And so it's definitely something you should not ignore. Another huge reason that we want to do this is because metadata on your audio files helps with SEO. And again, SEO, you may be thinking, well that's for a blog, that's for a website, who really cares if it's attached to my audio files? Well, a lot of people actually because according to the latest research, internet searches is the number one way that people are discovering new podcasts. So this is another argument for why I say to have shown ads on your website, and then also help SEO out a little bit, it's not going to make a huge difference but a little bit by adding metadata to your audio files. So now that you know that the metadata is the information that displays the artist name, the artwork, the title, all of those things, let's talk about how to actually attach that to your audio files. Now you can do this inside of the desktop version of iTunes, I do not recommend that because it is kind of a pain in the butt. And as far as I know, there's no way to like save any of the information. So you have to enter it all in from scratch each time. But it is a free option if you absolutely have to go that way. However, the program that I recommend using is called ID three editor and yes, I will have a link to it in the show notes. The program is only like $30 I think the last time that I looked and they honestly have been so great. I've replaced my computer like five times. Don't ask I hate technology since I originally purchased this program. And every time I've just emailed them my like registration code or license key, whatever they call it, and they send me a new download link. So I've not had to repurchase it even though I've had to replace my computer multiple times. Now just so you know, I am also going to do a separate screen share video that kind of goes through this process really quickly. So you can do that if you want but if you're not in a position where you can watch the video in the show notes, you can just listen to this episode and it'll walk you through the process. So once you have it three editor installed, when you do the final action export of your audio file it should be exported as an mp3. When you're ready to add the metadata, which should be the last step that you do before you upload it to your hosting service like Lipson, you're going to find that audio file and then you're going to right click on it and then open with whatever the name of the program is on your device, it is a little bit different, I think whether your Mac or PC, mine's as Windows 83 editor. And then once you open up that audio file, in ID three editor, you're going to see two boxes, one that has a bunch of different fields for you to fill out and one that says Add your image here. And they should all be blank when you start with. So I'm going to have you fill in some information and then we're going to save a template so that you don't have to fill in this information every single time. So for the very first file that you do, in the top left corner, underneath the menu, you'll see a little checkbox that says enable tag so I want you to click that. Leave the track number blank, leave the title blank. Under artist put the podcast hostname so if it's just you put your name but if you have a co host, but both of you for album, put the name of the podcast for a year, obviously, but the year version onra, you can just type in podcast, leave the comments section blank, composer original artists leave those blank copyright in that field, put your actual copyright notice. And in the URL, you can put your website to the right of this, you'll see another set of boxes and the top is labeled with ID three v one, you can ignore that that's an old version of tags that basically nothing recognizes anymore, so you don't need to waste your time. And then where you see the thing that says Add your image here, right below that there's a little button that says Add, click on that and select your podcast, artwork your main image. Now I recommend for these files that it be a 300 by 300 pixel image. Just because we don't want it to be super, super large for when people do download this audio file, we don't want to make the file any larger than it needs to be. After you've added the image, I want you to go back to where you originally entered all that information at the top, you're going to see three tabs, one that says ID three v two standard, that's where you just filled in all the information, one that says extended, you can skip that, and one that says podcast, go ahead and click on that one. And then here you're going to click the checkbox to enable podcast tag, skip the identifier field. And then in the feed box, enter in your actual RSS feed. So this is a feed that you use when you originally submitted your podcast to all the various platforms, if you have not submitted yet is the URL that you will need to use when you submit your show. And you can find this from your hosting service. Okay, at that point, that is everything that will save as a template. And now we have to actually save them. So go to File and click on Save tag data. When you click on that, you can save this as a dot PDF file. And so go ahead and save this wherever it is, it is going to be easy for you to find each time that you do this. And you can name it whatever you want to name it. And then click Save. And what that does is now the next time that you're going to tag an audio file for your next episode, when you first open up the file on ID three editor, so when everything is blank, you'll go to file. And then you'll click Load tag data. And then you'll find wherever that TTF file is that you saved. And then you'll click on it and click Open. And everything that you just entered in should auto populate. So that will save you a little bit of time each time. Okay, so now that we have created the template and saved it, you'll need to fill in the rest of the information. So this is the information we need to fill in every episode. And that is the track number which again is at the very top of the ID three v two standard tab. So you don't need to do track blank of blank, you just need to do the track number. So just the first box there, and you can leave off any leading zeros and won't recognize them. For the title, you just put the title of the individual episode, artists album year and genre should already be filled in from the template in the comments section. That's where you put the description of the episode. So I just use the same description for Lipson and my show notes and here in the comments. Now over by the image, which you should now see yours because it should have saved or auto populated. You'll see another button there that says lyrics. Go ahead and click on that button and you'll see that your artwork disappears and where your request is now a blank box, go ahead and paste your show description in there as well. And then go over to the podcast tab. And you'll see a description box there and go ahead and paste the show notes description there as well. Once you have done all of that, you can just click update, and then close out of it and your information will be attached to that audio file. Now depending on who you host with there is an option. And I know that there is one for Lipson to automatically fill in some of the fields when you upload your episode for publication based off of the metadata or the ID three data that you have attached to this file. If you've never noticed it before, you might notice that now that you actually know what it means and some people would like to do that. So if you click that button, what it should do is take some of the information that you have entered just there with ID three editor, and auto populate some fields in Lipson with the appropriate information. This is a fantastic idea in theory. But I do not personally use this. Even though I tag and upload multiple episodes every single week for all my clients, I still don't use this because I don't feel that it works perfectly. There are some fields where auto populates the wrong information or add some stuff in the wrong places. And then I end up having to clean it up. So for me, I'm just so efficient that I can just flow through it right now. And I don't want to mess with having to correct What didn't auto populate properly. But if you want to try that out and see if it works for your show, that could also be a shortcut for you as well when you go to upload the episode. So I know that was a lot of information that he just threw at you there, especially if it's a program you've never interacted with, and you're not looking at it visually. Again, there will be a video in the show notes for this episode so that you can see me go through the process with a test file. So I do recommend checking that out if you do still feel a little bit confused or overwhelmed by this process. But again, once you get the hang of it, it can be just a matter of a few seconds for you to tag your file with metadata every time and your listeners and your Google ranking. Well, thank you. So that wraps up this episode. Thank you so much for tuning in. And I want to invite you to come back next week. Have a fantastic week. And that wraps up another episode of podcasting for coaches. If you'd like to connect with me further, you can do so on Instagram at podcasting for coaches. If you know it's time to finally get serious about starting your podcast, go to podcasting for coaches.com and click on the work with me tab in the main menu to learn more about my one on one launch consultation packages or my self paced online course. And I look forward to seeing the podcast that you create and put out into the world.