Looking for a CLI tool for MP3 tagging

[Joachim Schrod]

Loïc Martin wrote:
> Joachim Schrod a écrit :
>> Christoph Bier wrote:
>>> Joachim Schrod schrieb am 20.02.2008 17:08:
>> 
>> Hello all,
>> 
>>>> Can somebody recommend a command-line tool to change _one_ ID tag 
>>>> in an MP3 file? (I want to change the Genre tag, all other tags 
>>>> shall stay with the old values.)
>> 
>> Rather late, I would like to thank all folks who answered my question.
>> 
> 
> Rather late me too :)
> 
> You can also try renaming a group of selected files with Amarok. Unless 
> you're into writing shell scripts, that sould even prove faster than the 
> cli, especially if the audio files are in different folders on different 
> partitions - once Amarok has scanned all your drives, you can chose to 
> add all of them to the playlist, then rename all of them from there (or 
> select only a few, whatever the directories they are in. Quite 
> convenient if you use multiple partition and can't remember some odd 
> files scattered here and there.

Actually, I use amarok, and for my given task it was not 
appropriate. It's actually a nice use case for scripting; we 
started with interactive changes first. We have 1000+ songs where 
we want to add completely new genre tags to it, for easier creation 
of dynamic playlists. (My  partner got an iPod for Xmas. :)

In Amarok, we would have to open the artist in the collection view, 
double-click on each song to add it to the playlist, and then one 
could retag the songs in the playlist. For each song, two 
interactions. (Many songs of one artist one could mark with range 
select, but that doesn't change it in principle.)

It is actually much more work effective to just create a text file 
with the song list (stored as artist/song.mp3 anyhow), and add a 
genre digit to the end. In Emacs and picture mode, this is one key 
press per song, on the numeric keypad. It doesn't get more 
effective than that. ;-) The script that iterates over the 
song-list-file and tags each song from there with the appropriate 
genre is trivial.

Concerning renaming files with Amarok, you must be careful.
I haven't yet tried amarok 1.4.8, but 1.4.7 sucks if you have UTF-8 
chars in your song titles and want to have them in your file names 
as well. (I'll not done the update yet, because I'm still waiting 
for libgpod 0.60 to hit Gutsy backports, which supports iPod 
classic. Sigh, it seems I have to compile it myself.)

Best,
	Joachim

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Joachim Schrod				Email: jschrod at acm.org
Roedermark, Germany