After messing with some files in my MP3 collection yesterday, I got frustrated with all sorts of inconsistencies in the ID3 tag information. Artists names weren't always capitalized the same way between album rips. Sometimes I had changed the v1.x and not the v2.x tags. Some files didn't have v2.x tags defined at all. I couldn't tell which tags mythmusic was favoring to get it's information. I decided things had to be consistent and that everything is going to be ID3v2. After hunting around for a while and bemoning poor ID3v2 support, I discovered two great utilities which both support ID3v2.
The id3lib project comes with the great command line tools: id3info and id3tag. By default, they simultaneously manipulate *both* v1.x and v2.x tags! Nice! Great for scripting, touch-up tagging or batch tagging. id3lib also features a wonderful command id3convert which allows you to convert v1.x tags to v2.x tags and vice-versa. You can even strip out v1.x tags and leave v2.x tags. (Which I what I prefer.)
easytag is a great GUI tool that supports filling in tag information from filenames, mass tagging, and, most importantly, renaming files based on the ID3 info. Very nice for cleaning up whole batches of files all at a shot. I've been somewhat fickle with my naming conventions, so easytag's file renaming has really rescued me there. And, of course, I told easytag to strip out v1.x tags and only write v2.x tags.
I can't end without mentioning the trusty mp3info utility. Even though it doesn't do ID3v2 tags, it is the only command line tool I'm aware of that can give me that data rate statistics for VBR MP3s. Maybe there is another tool out there that one of you could tell me about? (sox tells me about everything but the data rate.)
In the whole process, the most interesting fact I found was that ID3 tags aren't just for MP3 files, but for a whole other host of media files. Cool!
Posted by enigma at February 20, 2005 11:21 PM