bashtagger: Joining the coalition party

I eagerly await the arrival of the console tool that replaces EasyTag on my system — even more so now than I have for the past five or six years, because EasyTag took it upon itself to make the leap to GTK3, and now splatters my screen with all kinds of ungodly ugliness. 😳

I’ve come close, with both stag and cursetag, and my hope is that the prophet appears soon who will herald the arrival of the chosen one. I did get another tip from hakerdefo that bashtagger might be close, but I’m withholding my endorsement until the miracles can be verified. 😉

bashtagger works in a menu format, allowing you access to tag information in flac or ogg files (no mp3, which suits me fine). You can set and erase tags over single or multiple files at once, and most every interaction is done through a line-editing prompt.

Color use is good, and the menus are exceptionally easy to navigate. In fact, the only difficulty that I had with bashtagger was its preference to run from the same directory as its target files. I am not sure why my attempts to feed it a target directory were turned down, but it was easily sidestepped by moving the script to the same folder as the files.

bashtagger does allow for a configuration file, and apparently that’s where the options to rename files based on their tags must reside. I tried once or twice to rename music files according to their internal tags, but the results I got were different from what I expected. I will take responsibility for those errors though.

By my experience, bashtagger lacks the one small feature that might rank it with things like stag or cursetag — the ability to reverse the rename function, and fill tag data based on the file name.

It’s a bit of an oddball feature, but it’s the one I look for as a sign of a true believer. I looked long and hard at bashtagger, but I don’t think it includes that feature, which makes me sad. If I have overlooked it, please help me.

bashtagger does seem to streamline the omnipresent console tools that can fill data or erase tags via command-line flags, which I count as an improvement. I’d like for it to make the last remaining steps toward the few features it doesn’t yet have, but I am patient.

The collective irony is that between these three — stag, cursetag and bashtagger — and the built-in tagging tool in ncmpcpp, EasyTag might no longer be needed. … 😕