Command LIne Tag Editor?

[RobbH]

There are bound to be times when that could be very handy.

[pfarrell]

Right now, my tagtool utility has the following commands

Usage of mm/mm: [flags] directory-spec
-a artist map - list artist not in source code (gpmap)
-c Album track order - output cp command in track order
-csv
output CSV format
-de
debug on
-dup
duplicate song based on title, album & Artist on
-duptitle
duplicate song based on just the title on
-h help
-i inventory - basic inventory
-j output metadata as json
-l list - list files
-ng
nogroup - list files that do not have an artist/group in the title
-nt
notags - list files that do not have any meta tags
-r rename - output rename from internal metadata
-s summary - print summary statistics
-sn
show no song titles (in inventory and other listings)
-z list artist names one per line

the -j (json) will list, in json format, all of the files in the path.
The -i -csv commands will print out the "inventory" in CSV format, based on the metadata tags.
I use the -i -csv -sn to print just the artist and album name, in sort order in CSV so I can slurp it into a spreadsheet
and compare what the songs on the disk are to the songs in my trays of songs.

You could load the json output directly into a spreadsheet, but it would have replicated tags.
Easy to fix, if you want something else

something like this:
[{"Artist":"Heart","Album":"Greatest Hits","Title":"Alone","Genre":"Rock","Disc":1,"Dis cCount":1,"Track":6,"Year":2000,"MBID":"d2c1d3fa-31ae-4fd1-b0be-daf95ee06d21"}
,{"Artist":"Ann Wilson \u0026 Robin Zander","Album":"Greatest Hits","Title":"Surrender to Me","Genre":"Rock","Disc":1,"DiscCount":1,"Track ": 9,"Year":2000,"MBID":"62775884-fbe0-4e07-9cce-aba60d219f0b","AcoustID":"963f4300-a97a-475c-a045-1ed5aba806c8"}
,{"Artist":"Heart","Album":"Greatest Hits","Title":"The Road Home","Genre":"Rock","Disc":1,"DiscCount":1,"Track ":18,"Year":2000,"MBID":"dfc65a4f-3d50-4abe-8a3a-985a7f4241ec","AcoustID":"f8e99815-87f2-4e66-92dd-efe376c322ae"}
,{"Artist":"Heart","Album":"Greatest Hits","Title":"Back to Avalon","Genre":"Rock","Disc":1,"DiscCount":1,"Tra ck":15,"Year":2000,"MBID":"1e9038a2-68b5-42d8-b14f-e62817beab21"}
,{"Artist":"Heart","Album":"Greatest Hits","Title":"Black on Black II","Genre":"Rock","Disc":1,"DiscCount":1,"Track ": 16,"Year":2000,"MBID":"be8b844f-f50c-41a0-8c2e-499203ac982e"}
,{"Artist":"Heart","Album":"Greatest Hits","Title":"I Didn’t Want to Need You","Genre":"Rock","Disc":1,"DiscCount":1,"Track " :11,"Year":2000,"MBID":"5a69b921-fa14-48f5-ae25-38288ce857cf","AcoustID":"d339971d-1242-47b6-afde-0860460b7dc6"}
,{"Artist":"Heart","Album":"Greatest Hits","Title":"If Looks Could Kill","Genre":"Rock","Disc":1,"DiscCount":1,"Track ":2,"Year":2000,"MBID":"b5e5f1cb-f80f-42c4-b68b-fbbdc3bb73f0"}
,{"Artist":"Heart","Album":"Greatest Hits","Title":"Nothin’ at All","Genre":"Rock","Disc":1,"DiscCount":1,"Track " :5,"Year":2000,"MBID":"84b0a453-f7de-41ab-8509-494d532c75a9"}
,{"Artist":"Heart","Album":"Greatest Hits","Title":"All I Wanna Do Is Make Love to You","Genre":"Rock","Disc":1,"DiscCount":1,"Track " :10,"Year":2000,"MBID":"1859df00-7561-4626-9202-32ab3cb3b3fe","AcoustID":"ef98b684-a238-45bd-b903-3f31c646e644"}

[RobbH]

I can tweak the software I've been writing over the past month or so to do this is you still need it.
My code reads the Vorbis/mp3 tags using David Howden's wonderful library. Its trivial to have the answers output in a CSV format.

My driver just takes a filepath, and walks all the directories, subdirectories and files on down. Mine is all open source, on github.com, etc.

Thanks, Pat. I don't feel a great need for this now, but I still think it would be great for you to share it. At the moment, I'm happy using sshfs with mp3tag or puddletag on my desktop or laptop. But I think there can never be too many options available for the command line. It's always possible I'll want this tool in the future. If not, someone, somewhere will have a need for it!

[pfarrell]

I can tweak the software I've been writing over the past month or so to do this is you still need it.
My code reads the Vorbis/mp3 tags using David Howden's wonderful library. Its trivial to have the answers output in a CSV format.

My driver just takes a filepath, and walks all the directories, subdirectories and files on down. Mine is all open source, on github.com, etc.

[RobbH]

Hi RobbH

I should have posted this link instead:

https://www.cfuttrup.com/streamingaudio.html#managinglibrary

Cheers,
Claus

Thank you!

Thanks also for concept described in the link you provided earlier. A very similar approach could be used in Linux, turning the output of a command line tag tool into a shell script. That had not occurred to me. Chances are good that I will make use of that idea some day!

[cfuttrup]

Hi RobbH

I should have posted this link instead:

https://www.cfuttrup.com/streamingaudio.html#managinglibrary

Cheers,
Claus

[RobbH]

Hi RobbH

This is not exactly what you're asking for, but there is a software simply named TAG, which can manage tags in music files (from the command line). You can see more about it here:

https://www.cfuttrup.com/cli_management.html

Best regards,
Claus

Thank you, Claus. Even though it's not what I was looking for (this time), it's good to know about other tools, which might come in handy in the future. Is the tag.exe software available for download? If there was a download link in that article, I missed it.

[cfuttrup]

Hi RobbH

This is not exactly what you're asking for, but there is a software simply named TAG, which can manage tags in music files (from the command line). You can see more about it here:

https://www.cfuttrup.com/cli_management.html

Best regards,
Claus

[RobbH]

I had not considered that option. Many thanks!

Or rather, I should say I hadn't considered those options. I was aware of X forwarding but have never tried it. I wasn't aware of sshfs. I now know it does exactly what I want.

Thanks again!

[RobbH]

Not aware of such an application.
Instead:
- mount with sshfs instead of samba
- use ssh X forwarding to run a gui tagger on the remote host

I had not considered that option. Many thanks!

[Roland0]

Is anyone aware of an interactive tag editor for the command line that displays files and their tags in tabular form? This is for Linux, but it's probably redundant to say that.

What I'm trying to say is that I hope to find something that looks and works much like Mp3tag or Puddletag, but works in a terminal environment. It should load the files in a folder and display the filenames and tags in a table, which could then be edited onscreen.

I am not looking for command line tools like id3v2 or metaflac. I already have plenty of those and use them on occasion. For comparison, if I were looking for a command line file manager, I would want something like mc (Midnight Commander), not tools like the cp and mv (copy, rename, move) commands.

The only thing I've seen that seems to be close to what I want is beets. It is intended to be a library management application, which is much more than I want. It might be possible to limit it to the tasks I want to do, but it looks like a chore.

When somebody asks for something off the wall like this, the question often comes up, Just what is it you want to do? Here's my explanation:

I usually use Mp3tag (in wine) or puddletag to edit tags in my files, which are on a usb ssd connected to the machine that runs LMS on Debian Linux with no gui. The music files are on a Samba share, so they can also be accessed from my desktop, running Linux Mint 20. Unfortunately, the Samba implementation in this version of Mint is buggy. The release notes warned about the issue. It's usually not a problem, but occasionally I encounter files that cause everything to slow down to a glacial pace. When that happens, it may take hours just to read and then write new tags to a handful of files.

So I would like to be able to ssh into the computer running LMS and edit tags there. Does anything like what I'm looking for exist?

Not aware of such an application.
Instead:
- mount with sshfs instead of samba
- use ssh X forwarding to run a gui tagger on the remote host

[RobbH]

Is anyone aware of an interactive tag editor for the command line that displays files and their tags in tabular form? This is for Linux, but it's probably redundant to say that.

What I'm trying to say is that I hope to find something that looks and works much like Mp3tag or Puddletag, but works in a terminal environment. It should load the files in a folder and display the filenames and tags in a table, which could then be edited onscreen.

I am not looking for command line tools like id3v2 or metaflac. I already have plenty of those and use them on occasion. For comparison, if I were looking for a command line file manager, I would want something like mc (Midnight Commander), not tools like the cp and mv (copy, rename, move) commands.

The only thing I've seen that seems to be close to what I want is beets. It is intended to be a library management application, which is much more than I want. It might be possible to limit it to the tasks I want to do, but it looks like a chore.

When somebody asks for something off the wall like this, the question often comes up, Just what is it you want to do? Here's my explanation:

I usually use Mp3tag (in wine) or puddletag to edit tags in my files, which are on a usb ssd connected to the machine that runs LMS on Debian Linux with no gui. The music files are on a Samba share, so they can also be accessed from my desktop, running Linux Mint 20. Unfortunately, the Samba implementation in this version of Mint is buggy. The release notes warned about the issue. It's usually not a problem, but occasionally I encounter files that cause everything to slow down to a glacial pace. When that happens, it may take hours just to read and then write new tags to a handful of files.

So I would like to be able to ssh into the computer running LMS and edit tags there. Does anything like what I'm looking for exist?