I have been converting my mp3 recordings by dividing the songs into tracks after which I’ve been sharing my audios with my kids from my google drive to theirs. Each recording (with multiple tracks) is a separate folder. My son would then pull them into VLC player on his iphone and it would put each recording in its own playlist. He stated that the last 5 or so recordings that I’ve shared have all been downloading into the same playlist. He thinks that it has something to do with the fact that the artist or contributing artist is showing “My Recording” for every track in each of the separate folders. Until a recent Audacity update, when I went to divide by track and export, the metadata box popped up automatically. It has not been doing that and I did not realize I needed to open it through the “edit metadata” box so I simply exported by track title without changing any metadata.
Can someone please help me understand the difference in adding something to the contributing artist, artist, or album name boxes? Is this what is making a difference when I share folders because I have not added anything to either of these boxes? Which one should I choose? As an example, it may be the same group singing but on different dates. I want each date kept separately, in its own folder. If I don’t change any metadata, it will show “My Recording” and lump every single date together into 1 playlist through his VLC Player. If I add an Album name in metadata (same/matching the folder name), will this fix the issue? Is there perhaps a different iphone audio player app that someone could recommend which may fix his issue?
I am giving you the same advice and insight as I did for another user yesterday:
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In the latest versions of Audacity the metadata dialog does not appear automatically for Export Multiple, rather there is a button you need to use:
BUT be aware that there is an, as yet, unfixed bug that means that the metadata propagation is not working in multiple export - please see:
Sadly this bug has been open for a year and shows no sign of anyone trying to fix it. Muse assigned a low priority P3 rating to this bug back in June 2024, so they regard this as not important to fix.
It has been present since Audacity version 3.4.0 - so the last version where it works properly is 3.3.3 if exporting multiple metadata is important to you.
Old versions of Audacity can be downloaded from here:
Footnote
When I was digitizing my LPs and tapes many years ago I never bothered with metadata in Audacity, instead I exported to iTunes and managed my metadata there (much easier).
Audaciaty has been notoriously bad at managing metadata - ther remain a whole raft of logged and unfixed metadata bugs:
Thank you Peter. Your post must have been the one I came across before I asked my other questions. Can you explain to me the difference in the fields Contributing Artists, Artist, and Album? Can I just make the album title the same as my folder name and that would be good enough for VLC Player to recognize that it should create a different playlist for each album? I have tons of cassettes and cds that I want to digitize and find this might be a bigger problem down the road if I don’t add any metadata. I can change the metadata within Windows Explorer, going through properties and applying the new information.
You can select a folder-full of files and add/edit all of the common information once.
Then you can edit the track numbers & titles, and whatever is different for each track.
MP3Tag also supports album artwork whereas Audacity does not.
I only use VLC for video but most media players don’t care about the physical location of the files and they just go-by the metadata. Most media players also support playlists.
My digital music library is organized as Genre/Artist/Album/Song.
…Except most of my music is in a folder called “Rock and Popular” so I don’t have separate folders for every genre. I have separate folders for special-unusual genres like Christmas, Mexican, Soundtracks, Live Concerts, etc., and I have all of my various artist albums in a separate folder.
Thank you. I usually just use Properties under Windows Explorer to edit these 3 options but I will look into MP3Tag to see if the program offers more options that I might find useful for my other albums.
I will change the metadata on a couple of the albums and see if that works for his purpose of if he should just find a different player that offers offline capability.
