ID3 tag reading and importing

Starting in Music Collection 2.3, a new and very handy feature has been added. "ID3 tags" is a set of metadata available on some audio files (MP3, AAC...) that contain info about that particular song: Artist name, album name, year, genre, duration, lyrics... even artwork imagery!

This information can be readed by Music Collection when adding new songs into the system, with the purpose of avoiding having to enter all this information manually, which can be a very tedious task for the admins and users, and can save lots of time when adding new content into your site.

What the system does it pretty easy to explain: when uploading a new file, or simply creating a new song, it will process it and read all the ID3 tag info, if available. Then, if you haven't defined this data when creating the new song, the system will try to fill it out for you. It will create a new artist if necessary, a new album, add the duration to the song, type the name of the song, even create a new album picture using the metadata available on the file!

That means you don't need to manually put any data in, if you don't want to: you can let the system do it all for you, you only need to provide the file!

Another handy feature is that this will work not only for individual uploads, but you can also use this feature to scan a folder and import all the files in it into your system, letting the ID3 tag engine to do all the data creation work for you (this function is available only on the administration area, for the admins to use).

In other words, you can just point to a folder in your site, containing several songs, and let the system "process and import it" for you. It will create all artists necessary, all albums, all pictures and more, in just one click! You can see a demo of this feature on the following video:

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The system can read ID3 v1 and v2 data, plus other media files such as iTunes encoded QuickTime information, found in some MP3 and AAC (M4A) files.