If you are like me someone who constantly listens music and who has a big collection, by purchasing and then ripping CDs, a decent tag editor is an essential tool. I’ve been using Linux (Ubuntu) for the past two years or so and the only drawback that I was constantly faced with was the lack of a good audio tag editor – basically a Linux based equivalent to mp3tag. After a researching a I across Linux Audio tag editors like Ex Falso, EasyTag, Pinkytagger, Jaikoz, Picard, etc. which i found had a lot of drawbacks until I found Puddletag. I finally settled on running mp3tag under Wine. Whilst it works, it’s still a compromise because it cannot handle case sensitivity, cannot rename folders and filenames and path lengths are limited to Windows file system restrictions. In addition, there were a number of functional enhancements and additions I wanted to see in mp3tag, but didn’t seem like they’d see the light of day.
How is puddletag different from other Linux taggers?
Well, for starters, if you’re familiar with mp3tag, you’re going to be right at home with puddletag…from the user interface, through to Extended Tags, Actions, regular expressions, Tag Sources etc. In addition, puddletag offers a host of functionality you’re not likely to find in a single tagger, including:
- Retrieving tags from clipboard – why copy track data from a website, save it to a file and only then write it… pop it into the clipboard and write it from memory?
- Fully customisable screen layout. Drag and drop windows to where you’d like them or turn them off altogether.
- Fully customiseable Tag Panel.
- Extended Tags view/editing including visual confirmation of what’s going to be added/ edited and/ or deleted – no more guessing what you’ve put in train…changes are colour coded according to the nature of the changes you make (distinguishing between additions, edits and deletions).
- Drag and drop columns in main view to reorder them
- Right click on a column header to add additional columns
- A spreadsheet-like layout that enables selection of individual tags/cells across multiple files and performing operations on the selected tags only
- Copy and paste any combination of tags to multiple files in a single operation
- Quick search and replace of text across selected tags/ cells or entire tracks using Ctrl-H (no need to write an action for a quick search/ replace operation)
- ability to see stored tags as written to file (i.e. without tagname translation) to help resolve pesky issues like ID3 and Vorbis tag types in a single file
- ability to tag single tracks using tag sources (handy when the album you’re looking for doesn’t exist in tag sources, but the songs do exist in other albums found in tag sources (why tag by hand when you can just take track metadata from other albums)
- easily select all tracks in a folder using a hotkey (Ctrl-Shift-S) (no more dragging the mouse cursor around and shift-clicking)
- resize/ relocate/ close windows (configure your workspace to suit you, and puddletag will remember window locations when you reactivate them)
- realtime results feedback when defining actions (takes the guessing out of whether an action or a function is going to do what you’re hoping it will do…you see the results an action will generate as you define it)
- dynamically change main window font size to suit your needs
- launch puddletag with a predefined font size designed to suit your needs
- (optionally) dynamically size columns to match tag metadata
- predefined and readily editable tag patterns always available to you through a pulldown menu
- customisable hotkeys
New Features in Puddletag 0.9.6 (15/10/10)
- Actions and Functions now operate and write multiple-valued fields.
- A bunch of new Functions, see the Functions page for a listing.
- Two new scripting functions copied straight from Mp3tag, $meta_sep and $meta. See the scripting page for details.
- A new icon. This one designed by Yianni Pappas-Acreman.
- A new Tag Tools menu, with which you can remove ID3 and APEv2 tags from files where they don’t belong.
- Configurable confirmations. Like when you want to Rename Directories, etc.
- A __dir name field. Modify this field to rename the directory.
- UFID frames for ID3v2 Tags.
- Monkey’s Audio File’s are now supported.
- The Actions and Functions dialogs can now be tool windows too (See Windows Menu).
- All docs have been updated.
Download it from here for Ubuntu 10.04/10.10 users.
You can find Puddletag under Applications–>Sound and Video–>Puddletag