Thursday, June 23, 2005

EasyTAG

A few days ago, I finally decided to sort all my MP3s. I started erasing lots of cruft that I never listen to and then renamed some files I had with weird names. I ended up with this layout: Artist/Album year - Album name/Song number - Song name.mp3.

When finished, I was exposed to the task of setting up the ID3 tags for all of them, something I did in the past using custom shell scripts together the id3v2 utility. However, this was a very error prone task, mainly due to string quoting in the shell.

So I decided to give a try to the EasyTAG utility. Man... what a wonderful tool! Just needed a few minutes to discover how it worked, and some minutes later, I had all my songs with correct ID3 tags in them. Certainly, give it a try.

Hmm, now it is a pleasure to use Rhythmbox, as all the songs appear correctly classified. Unfortunately, as it doesn't have an equalizer, I'll stick to Beep Media Player.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

[Originally posted at 2005-06-26 01:43 pm UTC]

For MP3/Ogg tagging, you should take a look at Tagtool. It does not have all the CDDB features of EasyTag, but it has a way much cleaner Gtk2 interface and is even more easy to use.

About the layout you've choosed, I'll just say that spaces in filenames aren't always a good solution, especially if one day you need to run find-based actions on your music files.

My layout is genre/artist/album/track_-_artist_-_album_-_title.(mp3|ogg|flac), with track numbers zero-padded (01, 02, ... 09, 10, 11) and all chars are in the character class [a-Z0-9_-] (7bit ASCII) so I avoid any filesystem charset related problems.

As a music played, you could also try MusicPlayer Daemon (musicpd.org).

- Sam

Julio M. Merino Vidal said...

[Originally posted at 2005-06-26 05:11 pm UTC]

I'll take a look at tagtool, but it needs to be packaged first ;)

About my naming scheme, I'm using spaces because I also use other non-ascii/punctuation characters, so I have trouble anyway (spaces are the least of the problems caused by these).

At last, I'm installing gmpc ATM (the GNOME frontend for musicpd); looks interesting.