Linux Multimedia Hacks

Automate Music File Tagging

Why tag your music files one by one? Use the EasyTag program to automate the naming and tagging of your music.

EasyTAG is a utility for viewing and editing tags for MP3, MP2, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, MusePack, and Monkey’s Audio files. Its simple and nice GTK+ interface makes tagging easy whether you’re editing tags manually or taking advantage of EasyTAG’s automatic tagging. This hack walks you through using EasyTAG to add tags to your audio files.

To get EasyTAG, go to the official EasyTAG download page at http://easytag.sourceforge.net. This page contains packages for most major distributions or, alternatively, you can download and compile it from source. The program depends on the following libraries:

• GTK 2.4

• id3lib to handle MP3 files,

• libogg and libvorbis for Ogg Vorbis files

• libFLAC (along with libogg and libvorbis) for FLAC files

After EasyTAG is installed, launch it from your desktop menu or type easytag in a terminal. The main window (see Figure 2-9) is split into a tree browser on the left side that is used to select audio file directories, and a tag editing section on the right. In the tree browser, select the directory that contains your media files and EasyTAG will search for supported files. All the files it finds are displayed in the middle pane with a variable background color to show, at one glance, the files in the same directory.

Figure 2-9. EasyTAG ...