Audio Tag Tool is a metadata manager for Ogg Vorbis and MP3 files. The metadata it manages defines such information as Artist, Genre, Album, Track Title, and so on. These bits of information are often called “tags”, and some of the more robust tagging implementations (such as that employed by Ogg Vorbis) also support acoustic fingerprinting.
Among the more useful features are: mass tagging (based on filename or user-defined values), and mass renaming (based on tags). These features allow you to conveniently add information to broad swaths of your music collection. If you (like me) have your audio files sorted meticulously into a neat directory structure, with a consistent naming convention, Audio Tag Tool allows you to quickly and efficiently sort new content into that hierarchy.
Combine the ability to act on tags with the magical tagging powers of Picard, and you have a recipe for (nearly) instantly sorting even the largest music libraries into whatever structure suits your needs.
I can’t think of enough good things to say about this application. I love it. It has saved me hundreds of hours, if not far more than that1. It is a key element I rely on to keep my music collection organized. The tag-editor is simple, the batch-rename feature is a gift from the computing gods, and the option to guess tags based on filenames is downright handy.
The playlist creation is also quite useful, for people who actually use playlist files. This thing also doesn’t choke on massive libraries (I’ve seen it take 5-10k of songs, and scan them without complaint).
I would like to see CDDB/FreeDB support added, and maybe a cover art search option… I don’t think much else would be needed. This is an awesome application, and a must-have for anyone with more than 50 albums in their library.
Download Links
- Audio Tag Tool for Ubuntu (requires 7.10+)
- Picard for Ubuntu (requires 7.10+)
- when compared to manually managing tags [↩]
