[clue-tech] directions to music players

[Maxwell Spangler]

On Mon, 2010-01-04 at 09:07 -0700, chris fedde wrote:

> One place where most of these tools fall down is on how they deal with
> albums that are not in the CDDB ( http://www.gracenote.com/).
> Rhythmbox  for example create an album called "unknown" and give the
> tracks names like "track-1" with no tagging.   This means that new
> "unknown" stuff hides older "unknown" stuff in the UI.
> 
> Most of the time even obscure stuff is found in the CDDB. But there
> are exceptions.  This Christmas my daughter got a set of audio books
> that were not in the CDDB.  Adding tags or adding them to the CDDB is
> pretty easy but I have not found the time and so she cannot yet listen
> to these items on her cheap sansa player.

One of the most satisfying programs I've found on Linux is EasyTag, a
id3 tag editor for mp3, mp4, ogg, and similar files.

A first look at EasyTag makes it look typically Linux: technical and
intimidating (for some) but with some optimistic experimentation it
becomes a classic power user's trusty tool.

EasyTag will help you provide id3 information for mp3 files via four
methods:

1) Select all tracks and have it reach out to CDDB to provide track
names automatically.

2) Manually query multiple online CDDB like resources for track
information and select albums and tracks yourself: Search "Telekensis"
for example and it'll give you all their known albums.  Find the one you
know you ripped and have it apply the results to one or more tracks.

3) Use the "fill in" tag feature.  If your mp3s don't have valid id3
tags but the filename is something like:

Peter Gabriel - So - 01 - Mercy Street.mp3

Then you can use a user-configurable filter on the "fill in" feature (in
this case "%a - %b - %n - %t" to pickup all four fields and fill them in
based on filename information.

4) Manually edit id3 info by hand with a very easy to use GUI style.

EasyTag works with id3v1, id3v2.x, embedded pictures, and is highly
configurable so your mp3 files reflect your sense of style and data
quality.

And it's Free.

-- 
Maxwell Spangler