I’m running Win7 and 2.3.0 and wondering if Audacity has a tool buried somewhere in it’s many features that would allow me to encode and save a group of MP3 files as an album. Or if there is some extension or program that anyone can suggest that provides this function?
Thanks!
The best (most widely compatible) way to group MP3s together as an album, is to create a “playlist”. Most audio players provide a means to create a playlist (refer to the documentation of your audio player).
Many thanks Steve! I always hope for a simple solution. 
Happy holidays to you!
Normally, your player software gets the album information from the [u]embedded metadata[/u] (AKA “tags”).
Once the files are in your music library (so the player software “knows” about the metadata) you can simply select the album. You don’t need to make a [u]playlist[/u] to play an album. And with the embedded track numbers, you player can play the songs in original album order or randomly shuffle.
You can also select all of the songs/albums by a particular artist, or all songs of a certain genre so you can easily select & play all of the Christmas songs, or all of the rock songs, etc., without making a playlist.
If you “rip” a CD, the ripping application will usually go online, find all of the information, and automatically tag the MP3 (sometimes not perfectly-correctly or sometimes not in the “style” you like.)
If you already have the MP3s it might be easier to use a special purpose tagging program. I use [u]MP3tag[/u].
Also the Audacity metadata editor doesn’t support album artwork, so if you want to embed artwork you’ll need to use another application. (Some player software can read an image from the same folder containing the MP3s and that means you only need one copy, instead of embedding the artwork in every file. But, embedded artwork seems to work with every player application.)
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…A couple of years ago I went through my entire MP3 library and entered/corrected the original release year (except for the obscure ones I couldn’t find). The automatic database will usually give the release year for the whole CD which could be “incorrect” for compilation CDs, or for songs that were originally released on vinyl. So for example, if I want to play songs from the early 60’s I can do that.
If you have an Apple device (or iTunes) you can automatically make a [u]smart playlist[/u] from various metadata… I have a “rock and popular” playlist and I have a 1960-1965 playlist that excludes Christmas music, plus some other smart playlists by-decade, etc. If I add a new song/album to the iTunes library it automatically gets added to any appropriate smart playlists.
What I have are a collection of garage band MP3 files with obviously no associated artwork or metadata. I simply want to create discrete album structures with enough metadata to allow me to play the collections as track 1, track 2 etc and allow random access. That would do me just fine.
I simply want to create discrete album structures with enough metadata to allow me to play the collections as track 1, track 2 etc and allow random access. That would do me just fine.
Yes, as a minimum you should type-in the title, album name, artist, and track number. You can do that with Audacity, MP3tag or other tagging application, or some audio player software can do it, etc.
Some kind of artwork/graphics is “nice” because you’ll see it when you play commercial music files. You could just make a “big picture” of text showing the title and artist, etc. Or you can download an image of a guitar or something like that…
My iPod Classic doesn’t show the genre or year but most software players do and it’s easy to add (as long as you know the year, which you do if you made the Garage Band files yourself.)
P.S.
I know somebody that paid an artist to make a painting he was going to digitize and downsize for his CD artwork… Then he never finished making the album. 