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Recently, I’ve been assisting instructors interested in offering podcasts to their students. Since many others write articles on podcasting basics, I won’t belabor those topics here (unless, of course, I get requests for it). Instead, I intend to share some tips on topics that I don’t see others covering, starting with building a music and sound effects catalog.

When used effectively, music and sound effects give podcasts a professional quality – introductory and “outtro” music, background music, pieces of music separating show segments, and sound effects all contribute to a podcast’s polish. In some cases, like the podcasts (or “netcasts”, as Leo likes to promote) offered by the TWiT network, music choice sets the mood for the show and helps establish a brand. However, it already takes so long to record and edit podcasts without adding additional audio that often people find they don’t have time to add that extra polish. With the right tools and resources, I’ve found I can collect and maintain an easily-searched database of podsafe audio, ready to drop in podcast episodes in minutes. Generally, the steps I’ve taken to build my podsafe catalog include:

1. Collect the music using Firefox and DownThemAll
2. Import music into MusikCube
3. Rate and tag songs as I listen to them
4. Prepare frequently-used songs with desired volume, fade and trim edits

After the jump, I’ll cover each step in depth.

Collecting the music.
First, I had to collect a sizable music library. I chose to steer clear of any copyrighted material, since faculty members may make their podcasts available to non-students. Since podcasts count as distributing or broadcasting, we need to be careful of artists’ rights.

I found several sources of “podsafe” music, using Google and various keywords including “podsafe” and “creative commons.” While I came up with many sources (several of which are saved to my del.icio.us account), I have so far downloaded music from two:

• Internet Archive: Open Source Audio
• Podsafe Audio

As I discovered, it is incredibly time-consuming to click on individual music download links – onerous enough that I almost gave up the entire project! Until, that is, I found DownThemAll.

DownThemAll is an extension for Firefox that acts as an advanced download manager. With one click of a button, I can instruct DownThemAll to filter out all embedded or linked files based on keywords and automatically mark music files for download. For instance, when you’ve found an artist you like at ARTISTServer, use “mp3,ogg” to automatically select music files and mark them ready for download:

Or, when downloading music from PodsafeAudio.com, use the keyword “download” to automatically select music files and mark them ready for download:

Each audio download site may require different keywords to filter and automatically mark music files – but once you identify those keywords, DownThemAll makes short work of downloading the music you find:

One other tool useful for collecting music worth mentioning, although I don’t use it, is Songbird. Based on Mozilla, Songbird is a media player with a twist – access a site with embedded music and Songbird lists tracks, making it easy to download them to your library. While Songbird makes downloading songs easier than scrolling and finding links in a webpage, I still turn to DownThemAll for batch-downloading.

Organizing the Music
I made several organization choices before downloading the first song, the biggest of which was to keep my personal music library separate from the podsafe catalog I build. Accordingly, I needed to use something other than iTunes to manage the podsafe catalog. After trying several media managers, I settled on a freeware app called MusikCube.

Many articles, including one written by the knowledgeable crew at MaximumPC, recommend MediaMonkey as their media manager of choice. I personally prefer MusikCube’s interface, but if you prefer a more folder-style interface, you might want to consider MediaMonkey. One advantage it has over MusikCube is support for the BPM (beats per minute) field in mp3 metadata tags, which we’ll get to later.

After settling on a media manager, I still had several organizational choices to make:

File and Folder structure
Since I decided to separate my music catalog from my personal library, I created the following new folder structure:

Podsafe Audio > (name of site downloaded from) > (artist) > (songs)

By following this folder structure, I could quickly tell what sites I’ve downloaded music from and what artists I’m missing from each site, which is the only information I need from a file structure. I won’t be browsing folders in order to find music – I’ve got better methods for cataloging and finding songs – mp3 tags.

MP3 Tags
To me, the most important pieces of information to store in standard mp3 tags are artist, song title, genre and download location. I’ll be using standard mp3 tags for browsing the catalog, mostly by artist and rating. MusikCube allows for easily modifying the mp3 tags for a single file:

or multiple files at once.

For more advanced mp3 metadata management features, including file renaming, importing tags from filenames, batch find/replace and more, check out Softpointer’s Tag&Rename, or the freeware alternative Mp3tag.

While entering accurate and consistent mp3 tags is important for browsing the library, I don’t intend to use the standard mp3 tags for quickly searching for just the right song – for that, I’ll use a concept called “tagging.”

“Tagging” or Folksonomy
All mp3 files include “metadata” information, commonly referred to as “tags.” These fields are typically restricted to common fields, such as Artist, Album, Track, Genre, Category, etc. These “tags,” confusingly, are different from the recent phenomenon referred to as “tagging.”

Tagging is a relatively new concept, and refers to free-associating keywords to objects for easier identification. In this case, if I were to rely on just category and genre, for example, my searches for songs would be limited to identifying all Electronic genre songs categorized as Suspenseful Mood, for instance. What if I want to search for all songs with no lyrics or vocals, heavy on drumline and using classical instruments, that are good for 10-ish second spots? With tagging, I can do just that.

Unfortunately, MusikCube doesn’t have built-in tagging features – in fact, none of the media managers I looked at had tagging functionality. However, with a little pre-planning, I was able to use the Comments metadata field to add tagging. First, I listed some tags I might search by when looking for music, including:

• Mood descriptors – suspenseful, uplifting, jazzy, swingy, etc
• Possible uses – theme song, intro, outtro, background, section break, etc
• “Partofsong” to indicate songs with useful pieces of audio – I’ll use this tag later to identify songs needing trimmed
• Type of song – techno, classical, vocal, etc
• Indicate “lyrics” or “nolyrics”
• Instruments used – violin, orchestra, flute, drum, etc

Thus, with tags properly assigned, I can quickly and accurately search for just the right song – all songs with no lyrics, for example.

Admittedly, using the Comments metadata as a “tagging” field is a bit of a kludge. For a better method, I turned to a dedicated tagging application featured in various places like Techcrunch, Lifehacker and Lifehack.org – tag2find. Using tag2find, you can quickly assign multiple tags to multiple songs, “drill down” through tags (start with “nolyrics”, then further filter song list to include only “classical,” then only “violin,” for instance), and much more. Of course, the trade-off for faster tag management is the added complexity of using another application in addition to MusikCube. To see the power of tag2find in motion, check out the screencast below:

[flashvideo filename="images/camtasia/tag2find.swf" width="500" height="385" image="images/camtasia/ishot-2.jpg" /]

Some additional tips.

Prepare frequently-used songs.
After producing a few podcasts, you’ll find there are particular songs you frequently use. Edit the song to the desired length, volume, add ducking (fade-ins and fade-outs), etc, then save the result as a new song in your library and apply the podcast name as a tag in the Comments metadata field. Also, when possible, edit mp3 songs with software that works natively with the mp3 format like mp3DirectCut to prevent quality degradation.

Calculate and add BPM information.
A song’s BPM, or beats per minute, indicates tempo, which in turn can indicate the speed or mood of a song. I personally don’t use BPM information, preferring instead to use tags indicating particular tempos and moods. If BPM information sounds like a useful piece of information to use when searching for songs, you can calculate the BPM using software like MixMeister’s BPM Analyzer. After calculating the BPM for a song, MixMeister adds it to the BPM field in the song’s metadata, which not all media managers show – among those that do are iTunes and MediaMonkey.

Another useful mp3 tagging app – Audioshell
If you find yourself using Windows Explorer to browse your music library, do yourself a favor and install Softpointer’s Audioshell. This excellent freeware app extends Windows Explorer by adding mp3-specific columns, hover tips and additional panes in file properties enabling quick tag edits:

Conclusion.
With a little organization, adding polish with music and sound effects isn’t that time-consuming after all. I listen to music while doing other things, quickly tagging and rating songs as they finish. Have you got tips you use for organizing your music catalog? Other software tools you favor? Let me know in the comments!

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