Hello - is it possible to create an album of multiple tracks and ensure that the listener can see the names of each individual track as they play on their audio device?
It has been a long time since I last read the ID3 tag metadata container specifications, so I may be wrong about this. If so, someone will no doubt correct me.
As I remember it, the metadata container is always in one single piece, either at the beginning (faststart) of the media, or at the end. I don’t think that breaking it up into multiple chunks in the streaming data is allowed.
There is an XML specification that allows interleaved chunks of data, usually timestamps, but I doubt that title tags are a part of it.
You might be able to simulate something like that using a SRT, or WebVTT file to display certain text at certain times. This would have the benefit of being able to experiment with it by just editing some text files. But the player would have to be able to display subtitles like an HTML5 <video> control. And of course, you wouldn’t be able to have actual subtitles.
Either way, Audacity is not set up to do anything like that for you out of the box.
If you want to try displaying the titles as transcripts, I do embedded transcripts in the web player on my website, so I know everything that needs to be done and I can give you more information in another post.
Most formats and most players/player software only support one set of tags (metadata) per file. And chapters/track markers are mostly a feature of the “shiny disc” formats.
If you buy an MP3 album from Amazon or M4A from iTunes you get a separate file for each song. Then your player software can play them in sequence as an album by selecting the album and configuring it to play them in track-number order.
The player software relies on the metadata and it doesn’t care about the physical organization/location of the files. (That’s assuming we’re NOT talking about an audio CD where the sequence does matter.)
Audacity can tag files but it has some “limitations” including that it doesn’t support album artwork. I use MP3tag (which works on all of the popular formats, not just MP3).
But MKA & MKV MIGHT support one-long-file with tracks, and maybe track names.
Thank you, DVDdoug
Thank you, Wrecks0