M-Audio Torq 2.0 [36/171] Editing fields

Chapter 4: Accessing Your Music

Torq 2.0 User Guide

File List

The window to the right of the Browser pane is called the File List. If you have selected a source in the Browser

that contains music (such as the Database or an individual folder), the songs contained therein will be listed

here. The File List not only shows you the name of the song, but also shows the artist name, album name,

track number, genre, and other fields contained within the song’s ID3 tag. These additional categories can

help you find song with greater efficiency.

Editing Fields

Torq will extract the relevant song information from the file’s ID3 tag in order to populate the fields of the File

List as described above. You are free to edit the information shown in the File List simply by double-clicking

a field, typing in new data and hitting Enter.

Torq does not update the song’s ID3 tag with your edits. Instead, your edited fields are stored in a special file

with the same name as the song, but with the extension “.tqd” at the end. This is the Torq Data file. By saving

your edits to the TQD file, Torq can save your changes much faster (changing an ID3 tag requires re-writing

the entire audio file, something that could affect system performance during live use). Additionally, the audio

file could become corrupted during the re-write process. So, Torq leaves your precious music files untouched

by saving data to the TQD file.

Sorting the List

There are fourteen categories that can be displayed across the top of the File List window: Artist, Song, Album,

Track # (Track Number), BPM (Beats Per Minute), Key, Genre, Length, Comment, File Type, Bitrate, Label, Year

and Filename. These categories are taken from the ID3 tags of your music files or, in the case of song length

and BPM, calculated as part of Torq’s file analysis. An ID3 tag is a standard format for storing additional in-

formation within a music file.

You can resize the width of any of these columns simply by clicking and dragging left and right on any of the

vertical lines separating the columns. Additionally, you can re-order the arrangement of the columns by click-

ing and dragging the column name to a new position (the column name will turn white while doing this). If

you wish, you can also hide certain columns from view by right-clicking on a category name and choosing

which items to display from the pop-up menu.

You can sort the contents of the File List by clicking on any one of the categories at the top of the window. For

example, if you click the “Album” category, the File List will be sorted alphabetically (A to Z) by Album name.

If you click “Album” again, the order will be reversed (Z to A). You could also click on the BPM column to sort

all your songs by their BPM. This can be very useful when looking for songs of a similar BPM.

Click the Reset button to return to the default sort order.

While ID3 tags will support storage of the information listed above, it is common to find music files with

some (if not all) of the ID3 fields blank. In these instances you can manually fill in the missing informa-

tion to aid future file searches.

The Filename column is available in the event that the music you’re trying to use does not contain an ID3

tag (such as AIFF and WAV formats) or does not have the proper text filled in. Here, the actual name of

the file (as it exists on your hard drive) will be shown.