What Are Attributes?
You are a unique person. Yyou've a name, a distinct set of facial features, a body, a personality, a race, a religion, and the list goes on and on. These qualities about you, these "attributes," are what make you unique and identifiable.
Songs each have their own set of unique attributes that make them identifiable too, such as their Title, the Artist who performed them, their Genre (style of music), their Tempo, what Album they're from, etc. In TunePrepper™, you're given the opportunity to label the attributes of your songs.
Why is Adding Attribute Information VERY Important?
Suppose you're a teacher lecturing to 500 people in a big lecture hall. All of the people look exactly alike. Same face, same clothing, same everything. You ask a question, and all of them raise their hands to answer. How do you call on one of them? Obviously, without some sort of distinguishing characteristics, that's rather hard. On the other hand, if each one is uniquely identifiable by their clothing, you might be able to say, "Yes...you in the front, with the bright red sweater."
The same holds true with music selection. In the TuneTracker System™, the unique labeling of each file's attributes lets our TuneStacker™ music selection software find exact "kinds" of music based on how you've labeled each audio file's attributes. For example, you can randomly find a song with the Genre "Rock" or the Tempo "Slow," or from the album, "Rock of Ages," or by the Artist, "Elton John." So unless you want to miss out on all the powerful music selction capabilities in TuneStacker™ it's crucial that you make certain to mark your songs (and other audio files') attributes with information according to the ways you want them to be found.
If your station reports to BMI, ASCAP, or other publishing agencies, there's another important reason to mark song attributes. Occasionally these agencies, BMI in particular, require full reports of all the songs that played, including Publisher information. If yyou've marked the Publisher information in your songs' attributes, that data will be automatically logged by TuneTracker™ as the song is played out over the air, making the creation of BMI reports very quick and easy.
Some Attribute Information is Added Automatically
If you're connected to the Internet while using TunePrepper™, and the CD you are ripping is fairly mainstream, a great deal of information gets retrieved and added to your files' attributes automatically. If you are not hooked to the Internet, or the CD is more obscure, none will be automatically added. In either case, though, you'll benefit by double-checking which attributes are there and which are missing, and assuring that all the ones important to yyou've been accurately filled-in, prior to clicking "Start" to begin the ripping and encoding process.
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