Mailing List Archive

mythmusic, id3, vorbiscomment, and why easytag is your friend
Lots of (very useful) patches/cvs-updates have been making the rounds in an
attempt to deal with mp3 and ogg file tagging.

For the completely uninformed, both mp3 and ogg format audio files can embed
information about a recording within the compressed audio file itself. By
setting metadata information like artist, album, track name, track number,
etc., an end user can help inform player applications regarding the data
required to categorize available content. One can also emphatically delineate
metadata by imposing a directory structure along the lines of
artist/album/song.

So what happens when you've spent the last 5 years building a huge directory
tree and you find an application (such as, by default, mythmusic) that
thrives on tags? Alternatively, what if you have a mess of audio tracks that
you have haphazardly collected over the years and want to finally combine
into a canonical database of your audio content?

Two (concatenated) words: easytag (http://easytag.sourceforge.net)

It does mp3 id3 tags. It does vorbis comments. When it says it has changed a
tag, that #$!@ing tag has actually changed. It can recursively descend
directory structures and intelligently assign tags based on position. It's
GUI based, with a great GTK tree widget for navigating quickly. It's the kind
of software that Apple spends a lot of money developing in order to be able
to show the world that good (end user) software is software that is just
plain obvious.

If you're using myth, if it's connected to your stereo, and if you're thinking
about how to organize audio content, you want it. Kudos to Jerome Couderc for
having written such a great program.


- thor

(Disclaimer: I have no direct connection to easytag and/or Jerome Couderc. I
do, however, rather like francophones, and this may have biased my position)