What are meta-tags used for?

[HowardBrazee]

I read the help and see long descriptions of meta-tag options. And I learned to uncheck "Conform song names" to get rid of errors loading songs.

But I haven't gotten my brain around what exactly they are used for. Is that why I have so many songs stored in the "Unknown Artist" folder?

[dave]

https://karaoke.kjams.com/wiki/Meta_Info

you should not be turning off "conform meta", as it keeps your files on disk nicely named.
if you're getting errors when doing that, those are real errors you should deal with, rather than sweep under the rug?

[DeusExMachina]

I think his errors are due to not having all L, T, R, and S fields specified by his given template.

[HowardBrazee]

OK, I did a test which showed I still don't understand what it is supposed to do. I turned on that setting, and copied a karaoke song that I found in /Music/kJams/kJams Music/Unknown Artist/Unknown Album to my download directory. Then I loaded it into kJams, and it created a new copy in that same directory.

[dave]

kJams does not organize your file storage for you, it's always going to do the dumb thing. what it DOES is organize your file NAMES correctly, and you CAN export from kJams into a very organized file storage layout. the meta data going into the song ID3 tags and the file names is very very useful. i admit it would be MORE useful if kJams did organize your file storage for you (instead of dumping everything into "unknown artist/album", i just haven't got around to that

[HowardBrazee]

So meta-data are very, very useful if I want to export my library?
If I want to export my library to another machine with kJams, I just copy it. So there must be some other reason to export a library "into a very organized file storage layout". I'm curious - where and why would we want to export a music library?

That reminds me. If I want to have a back-up where I live in case I move away (with my wife, who has my legal backup on her computer), can I copy our full library to someone's demo version of kJams, which can be upgraded at that time?

[dave]

meta tags are useful if you care to see any information ABOUT your song, including name, artist, album, duration etc.*, and that you care to see them in the correct columns, so that you can SORT by that column. eg: [Name:“Sc1234-04 - U2 - Desire”, Artist:“”, Album: “”] is not as useful as [Name:“Desire”, Artist:“U2”, Album: “Sc1234”]. with the former you can search, but the search will be slow, and you can NOT sort by name, artist, or album. with the latter, your search FASTER, AND you can sort by name, artist, and album.

the reason to export to an organized layout is for those of us who prefer organized layouts for whatever reason. You yourself expected the layout to be organized when you edit meta data in kJams (and organizing is what iTunes does, so people have reasonably come to expect it).

yes-ish: you can CLONE your library to another computer which only has a tryout version of kJams. However be careful if you ever RUN kJams in tryout mode using a library created in a licensed copy: playlists will be truncated to three songs, but not SAVED as having three songs as long as you don't EDIT that playlist. if you edit that playlist, it will be SAVED as having three songs and you'll permanently lose the original playlist (your songs are not affected by this, nor is the "Library" playlist)

* by "etc" i mean this: right click on any sort column header, you'll see a list of every possible bit of meta data you can view or set on a song. it's a very long list.

[HowardBrazee]

* by "etc" i mean this: right click on any sort column header, you'll see a list of every possible bit of meta data you can view or set on a song. it's a very long list.

I use some of those fields. I wish there was a different way to edit those fields other than adding them to the list and trying to select the fields to edit.

[dave]

I think you mean like the "Get Info" dialog, where a specialized window comes up allowing you to edit specific fields? Yes that would be nice, it's something I'd like to do.