10.13 Tagging Audio Files

20190819

Rhythmbox is a graphical tool that is also a capable of bulk editing tags in audio files. It can also be used to add images to tracks. Another graphical tag editor is easytag.

For the command line lltag (from github) provides a collection of capabilities for setting the tags within the file, based on the filename, for exmaple. It includes experimental ID3 version 2 support and also supports ogg, mp3 and flac audio files. Other tools include eyeD3 which is limited to mp3 audio files, and id3tool supporting only v1 ID3 tags in mp3 files.

Below is illustrated each tool and their commands for listing tags and setting tags.

For dealing with tags in mp3 files and managing the ID3 v2.3 tags by default use eyeD3:

$ eyeD3 *.mp3
$ eyeD3 --artist "The Stools" *.mp3
$ eyeD3 --album  "Haigh Rock" *.mp3
$ eyeD3 --genre  "Rock"       *.mp3
$ eyeD3 -a "Integral" -A "Devine Humanity" -t "Hello" -n 5 song.mp3
$ eyeD3 --add-image "cover.jpg:FRONT_COVER" *.mp3
$ eyeD3 --remove-all-comments *.mp3

To view the tags contained in ogg (and other) files use the -S option of lltag.

$ lltag -S *.ogg
$ lltag --mp3v2 -S *.mp3
$ lltag --ARTIST "Beenuts" --yes *.ogg
$ lltag --ALBUM  "Trusted" --yes *.ogg
$ lltag --GENRE  "Rock"    --yes *.ogg

To only view and manage the ID3 v1 tags:

$ id3tool *
$ id3tool --set-artist="Fred May" *.mp3

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