Organizing metadata

I need some guidelines for using metadata

I’m recording a book cronologically
I enter metadata on Export to MP3 but when I use Windows File Explorer the data shown is not in a good format for sorting.
Also the information is not where or how I thought it would be
Example:
entering the “Artist” name shows up in “Supporting Artist”

Sorry it posted before I finished

Where is the best place to record the date (month, date)

should every title have the month/day
I could number it 1-365
I found the track number is only numerical

If I use Jan 1-31, Feb1-28 Mar1-31 it will not sort correctly but alphabetically (Feb, Jan, Mar)

Windows File Explorer shows many dozen metadata options
Are they all available for common use?
There is an option in Audacity Export to MP3 for adding new metadata “columns”
How Will these show up?

Maybe someone knows a link for basic metadata usage

Thanks for any thought and help

Your best bet is probably to include the date in the file name.

The metadata situation is a mess! Different formats use different tagging standards. MP3s use [u]ID3 Tags[/u] but there a couple of popular “versions” in use. With ID3 there is no standard supporting artist field. There is an artist field and an album artist field (which I think is an “extended tag”). There is a year field, and apparently a there is date field but I haven’t seen any software that makes use of the date.

Audacity doesn’t necessarily completely support all of the tagging formats, and the metadata editor pops-up before you tell Audacity what format you’re exporting to.

If I just need to edit tags I use [u]MP3Tag[/u] which supports all of the popular formats, not just MP3/ID3.




And… You shouldn’t be “working” with MP3 files… It’s better to use WAV or FLAC. FLAC may be better for you because Metadata is for WAV not well-standardized or well-supported. (FLAC uses Vorbis Comments for metadata.) As you may know, MP3 is lossy compression. Data is thrown-away to make the file smaller. It can be very good and it can often sound identical to the lossless original but when you open an MP3 for editing it gets decompressed. If you then re-export as MP3 you are going through another generation of lossy compression and some “damage” does accumulate. If you want or need MP3s (sometimes required for audiobooks) it’s best to compress to MP3 ONCE as the last step.

I would (and do) use yyyymmdd…

For example today’s recording: “20220121 my recording

This will sort properly in correct order (you may want to add time hh:mm to the prefix if you make several in a day).

Peter.