K, So I’m sick and freaking tired of renaming and retagging mp3’s I download from various churches websites.
Schmelzer is about the worst, sugarland vineyard is probably the best so far.
Here is a simple guide to naming your sermons you put online.
1. Unless you have sermons online from prior to 2000, your naming scheme should be “Date – title of sermon” and the date should be in the yymmdd.
This is because who gives a crap if it has the 200x full date if you don’t have sermons from 1999 or earlier, and it is easier to sort if the file name starts w/ the year then the month and day. This will make sure they display in chronological order on your computers file lists.
2. Sort your directories by the author if you want or put their name after the date in the file name if you want them in one directory….do not put their name first. This makes sorting a terrible bitch.
3. All new mp3 playing software supports what they call ID3 tags, and they support ID3 version 2.something. This means you should USE ID3 TAGS. Hell, the Ipod doesn’t give a shit about the file name, it only lets you sort by your tags, so bad or no tags is not professional and not a good way to present your sermons online. To that end, I will detail how to properly tag your mp3’s for sermons.
4. The Title tag is the name of your sermon preferably precede by the date in the same format as the file name and a dash. Thus it looks like this “050204 – Bitching about MP3 tagging” in the title section. This makes it really simple to chronologically sort your mp3’s. Just putting the word “sermon” in the title is not acceptable.
5. The author is going to be the guy talking. Not the name of the church, not the senior pastor….the person who delivered the sermon is the only thing that can be here.
6. The album should be the church…not the sermon series. There is another better place for the series. So for my example it would be “Mercy Vineyard Church”…except I wouldn’t be actually ever preaching about file naming.
7. Comment section should be the word “Series: ” followed by the name of the series. You can sort by this field if you need to in any mp3 playing software, so this is a great place for this.
8. Genre should be either “Sermon” or “Spoken Word”. Use “Sermon” if it is an ID3 ver. 2.0 or higher tag, and “Spoken Word” if it is ver. 1.x. This is only because you are limited with what you can put in the old version. But most everything that is anything should support the 2.x version of the tags. No new mp3 player will have a problem w/ ver. 2.x tags.
9. The rest is pretty self explanatory. The track # is the number in the series, the year is the year….this time w/ the full 200x.
There you have it….I will not settle for less in our naming whenever we put our sermons online…neither should other places.