mp3rename: Rename and organize, in one fell swoop

No, it is not reruns week for K.Mandla. Back in January we had a little CLI tool named mp3rename, and now again, here’s a CLI tool named mp3rename.

Two separate tools with much the same approach and results. This mp3rename, which dates back to 2003 supposedly, adds the feature of organizing the output files, in a similar fashion to mussort. I don’t recall seeing this outside of one or two other utilities.

This mp3rename is a little convoluted to work with; I found I had to call specifically for the IDv3 tag to be used, or it came up with no data to sort or rename on. That might just be my files though.

And it’s worth mentioning that the renaming options seemed to stutter if they weren’t explicitly listed in the command, even though the help flag suggests there’s a “default” string mp3rename will fall back to. I got a lot of errors until I used one I drew up with no spaces, and tacked it on to the end of the command.

If you try this in Arch, you’ll need both perl-mp3-info from extra and perl-mp3-tag out of AUR. Offhand, I’m not sure what those correspond to in Debian; my search for “perl mp3” was somewhat scattered.

In all, this mp3rename — aside from the option to organize mp3s according to artist and album — doesn’t differ a whole lot from the other one. And goodness knows there are lots of other scripts, some specific to file types, that will do the same in much the same way.

The lesson to be learned here is, if you are a young Turk in software design circles, the command-line mp3 renamer utility has been done. And done, and done, and done, and done. … 😐

eyeD3: A CLI music tag editor, plus

Back to audio tools again, and already I can see a dull glaze settling over your vision.

Wait, don’t write this off already. I know we cruised through a whole month of audio tools and programs in July, and still had a few left over recently.

This is different, I swear. This is eyeD3.

Different, because it has a boatload of flag options.

Different, because its default output is nicely formatted and in color.

Different, because it can handle UTF-8.

Different, because it can work with plugins, if I understand it right.

Different, because you can import it into other python applications.

Different, because apparently it can implant lyrics, images and objects in files. 😯

Maybe those things don’t make it too different, but I don’t recall too many of our earlier one-line command apps that could do quite so much.

Otherwise, there’s not a lot that eyeD3 does that some of the others do. I appreciate that lovely output and clean color scheme, because that’s the kind of person I am.

One downside, and for some people it will be a big one: Apparently, eyeD3 only works with mp3 files. I tried one of my standby ogg files and got the “Nothing to do.” message. That’s sad.

But I know most people don’t keep oggs only in their collection, so I think it’s safe.

And in closing … last update was in the summer. Always nice to see software under active management. 🙂