Microsoft Monday
Many of you have an extensive library of songs on your computer that you’ve downloaded over time. If you’re like me, having all of the album information like the name of the song, the year it came out, and the artist is important. Today we’re going to be talking about how to edit MP3 details in Windows Vista so that your library of songs stay up-to-date and accurate.
Edit MP3 Details in Details Pane
One way that you can edit MP3 details in Windows Vista is in the Details Pane. This is the box that you see at the bottom of Windows Explorer when you’re viewing a song. Below is a screenshot of the details pane that I see when I click on the song “Have a Nice Day” by Bon Jovi:
Most of the text that you see in the Details Pane can be changed. Below is a close-up of the pane so that you get an idea of what all can be changed:
- Artist - Type in the name of the artist
- Album - Which album is the song from? Enter it here
- Genre - This is where you specify the music genre
- Ratings - Rate a song between 0-5 stars
- Year - This is where you can enter the year that it was released
- Title - Enter the title of the song
Notice in the image below how you can resize the pane to see more details which is a really nice feature. If you shrink it down to the smallest size possible, all you’ll see is a very small picture of the album art, the title of the song, and the artist. By expanding the pane to show more details, you’ll be able to view more information.
If you decide that you don’t want to view details, you can right click and select “Hide Details Pane.” If you hide the pane and decide you want it back, just click Organize > Layout > Details Pane.
Remove Properties
The details pane may include more information than you really want displayed. Luckily you can remove properties from displaying by right clicking in the pane and selecting “Remove Properties.” A Box will pop up where you can select which properties you’d like removed as shown below:
Edit MP3 Details in Properties Menu
Another way to edit MP3 details in Windows Vista is to right-click on a song and select “properties.” There are a ton of different details that you can change in the properties menu which you can’t change in the details pane. Here’s just a sampling of what you can view and/or change in the properties window:
- Select which music player the song should open with by default
- View/enter the publisher, when it was copyrighted, the URL for the author
- View and then copy or restore any previous versions that may be available
- Open advanced attributes and choose settings you would like for the particular folder (you can also compress or encrypt attributes as well)
- View Security details
Note: In both the details pane and the properties menu, you can bulk edit by selecting multiple songs at the same time.
Below is a screenshot which shows what the properties menu looks like:
Editing MP3 details in Windows Vista is very simple to do, especially with two different ways to go about doing it. For those of you who like to keep all of the track information correct and available for the songs that you have on your computer, you’ll appreciate using both the details pane and the properties menu (which you can find by right clicking on a song) in Vista.
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Tags: CyberNotes, Software
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MP3-Info adds a context menu property page to MP3s and also includes bitrate-based icons. It’s stable and been around for a few years. http://www.mutschler.de/mp3ext/
I haven’t done the metadata thing in Vista yet, but I know that in XP it is absolutely useless. WMP 10 in XP is a disgrace.
XP was really terrible with it, but they seem to have done a really good job in Vista with it. I especially like being able to tag my photos now.
My details pane (WMP11 Vista 64bit) is completely inactive - that is, it shows a generic MP3 logo and includes the list of details but no editing windows appear when they are clicked and there is no save button or any other button on the bottom to indicate that you can do anything but look at this pane. Anyone know what gives? I, as others, wanted to edit the various incorrect entries (artist in this case), except for Name, which can be already be edited when you click on the file itself.
The only thing that I can think of is that it’s a problem on 64-bit versions of Vista, but I don’t really see how that could be the case.
What I don’t have the detail pane option available, but can go into the properites and edit select fields - I would like to utilize the category field but it doesn’t come up in properties, any ideas on how to access?
You can’t enable the Details pane by going to Organize -> Layout -> Details Pane?
No the only option there is navagation pane, which is the folder list…weird.