How did it know the song name?

Hi everyone,

Just a quick question, out of interest. Years ago I downloaded a song with no name or title and named it "good song" because I had no info on it.

Only had Windows 7 for a day and I noticed that it had found the artists and song name of the file.

How did it do that? All it had to go by was "good song", lol . I can guarantee it had no other info available because the song was downloaded from an unrelated video and converted to MP3.



George.

Hi there
Usually when music is ripped from a CD / DVD or downloaded from an online store (or even elsewhere) the music has what's known as Tags (or Metadata) embedded within the files -- this doesn't alter any quality of the music but is picked up by decent players so you can see song titles etc.

Professional Photographers used a similar "tagging" system in their pictures containing details of Exposure, Lens used, camera used, aperture etc etc --this is known as the EXIF information. This metadata (like music "tags") can be edited etc etc.

There are universal standards so the metadata can be read by almost any player -- and there are a load of products you can use to create your own metadata if your files are untagged.

Cheers
jimbo

the song probably had ID3 tags already embedded in the file, as noted above by jimbo. The actual filename can be anything you rename it to, but the ID tags are still there and the artist and song name will show up in most media players (instead of the file name). And some media players will search the cddb and fill in missing ID tag information as well.

I downloaded the song from YouTube. I used the "youtube to mp3" program I found so I'm not sure whether the file would have come with tags. Also, there's no lyrics to the song .

Oh, and it was media player which found the file name.

There are some programs that use the MusicBrainz acoustic fingerprints service which identify the tune by sound so if you have bad tags then this can help. I know that WMP doesnt use MusicBrainz but it might use a similar service? Or is it purely tags?

the windows service wmpnetwork I think also sits in the background renaming tunes if you have set WMP itself to do that. So if you want to rename an mp3 track and windows refuses access, then wmpnetwork is probably the reason.