mp3wrap: What has been rent asunder shall be forged anew

Mentioning mp3splt before mp3wrap was putting things out of order, in a manner of speaking.

After all, mp3wrap bundles a series of mp3 files as a single, playable, continuous mp3 file, while retaining all the tag data. Magical.

And of course, mp3splt reverses that action, like we talked about earlier today.

mp3wrap handles itself nicely, keeps flags to a minimum, gives you plenty of information while it’s working, and keeps the concatenated file around the same size as a compressed file of the same info.

I’m not sure why a wrapped mp3 file would be preferable to split singles, but that shouldn’t perplex me. To each his own.

But what will keep me awake tonight is the question … could I wrap several wrapped files, and retain the individual file information? Can I wrap every song in my collection? Is there a mega-mp3wrap solution to all my music backup needs?

The mind boggles. 😯

mp3unicode: Possibly important

I’ll just say up front that mp3unicode converts mp3 tags between encodings. And to be clear, we’re talking about text encodings, not audio formats.

If that doesn’t seem to make sense to you, or if encodings are a bit fuzzy for you (as they are for me), then probably you don’t have much use for mp3unicode.

Which doesn’t make it less important, since encodings can be the bane of your existence if you lean toward one and you’re forced to use another. That I can empathize with.

mp3unicode behaves much like you might expect, except that it doesn’t sense the current encoding: You have to supply it.

As you might imagine, that can cause a little stress if you’re not sure what the encoding is to start with. But it will also back off from converting, if it thinks it’s already in Unicode.

I don’t see mp3unicode in Debian-Ubuntu-Mint. So you might have to build it yourself, if you’re not using Arch.

I’ll admit this is an esoteric tool. But you never know how important a tool like this is … until you need it. 😐

mp3splt: A rare animal indeed

I can attest to having personally used mp3splt. Once. About three years ago.

In its graphical form. 😳

Yes, I know, it’s a huge failure on my part. I suppose I just should have lied and said I was a die-hard terminal-only fan. No one would have known I was lying. On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.

But I’ll tell the truth this time, since it’s only a misdemeanor and not a felony to use mp3splt graphically.

The context may also be relevant. I asked a friend to rip a CD for me, and she was not a terrific computer person, and came back with a single, enormous bin-cue set of all the audio tracks in one lump.

I tried not to be disappointed since she had done a favor for me, and you can imagine the rest of the story. mp3splt came to the rescue, and the credits rolled.

In my defense, splitting an entire album out of one file is a rather tedious task for the command line, and so again, I feel no compunction about admitting it was easier to import and split the bin-cue that way.

And it may be that the GTK rendition is really the main tool here, and text-only mp3splt is just a backend tool. Like we talked about with inkscape‘s text only mode, or maybe mplayer or lilypond.

These are all just tools, not religious icons. Use them or don’t. Blah blah blah Linux freedom blah blah blah. You know the score. 😉

mp3info: The details, plus a little

By the looks of it, mp3info hasn’t seen any real updates in about eight years. That, of course, does not mean it is by any stretch unusable.

And if that was all mp3info did, we could call it done and move on to the next program. But take a look at this:

Hey, what’s that? An interactive id3 tag editor? And it’s got some actual visual arrangement to it?! It’s a Christmas miracle!

It is and it isn’t; mp3info’s “interactive mode” is still a bit primitive. Text editing is just arrow keys and space/delete; once you leave a line, you can’t reverse direction; once you leave a file, you can’t move back to it; there’s no mass-paste function, unless you first rely on mp3info’s existing command-line flags. I could go on.

This is a step in the right direction though. I’ve been on a quest for a proper music tag editor for the console for about a decade now — something like an EasyTag console application. And every time I get close with things like audiotag, id3ed, or lltag, or now mp3info.

Of course, if I had started to make one years ago when I first noticed this absence in the universe, it would be done now. And you wouldn’t have to suffer my complaining. 😐

mp32ogg: Deceptively simple

Technically I skipped over mp32ogg, running straight through to mp3convert.py yesterday.

If the name suggests to you converting from mp3 to ogg format, you’d be right. After a while, these little conventions start to make sense.

mp32ogg looks too simple to be effective. After all, there are only five or six flags available. And one of those is a simple rename mask flag, and another just passes quality level to the ogg encoder.

But it has a few nifty tricks at its disposal. One quick flag gives you the option to clean out the old mp3 files after their converted. Others give control over timestamps or character case.

If that seems sparse, remember that mp32ogg is intended to convert files. More than that might be a bit much to ask. There are other tools for tags or complex renaming or whatnot. mp32ogg is smart to leave it at that.

mp3convert.py: A very good mass converter

I mentioned already today that I have a lot of music that comes to me in other formats, even though I keep most everything as an ogg.

I don’t really have a rationale for that; I just happen to like it best. And I am not such an audiophile that I need something better or more accurate.

Converting it or downsampling it or adjusting it can be a rather arduous task; mp3convert can help though.

mp3convert uses very sane, very obvious flags to handle things like bitrate, conversions, recursion and so forth. If I didn’t know better, I’d think I wrote it myself.

I did run into a few errors when trying to convert between formats, but downsampling mp3 to mp3 seemed to work fine.

Although, I should be additionally honest and mention that I’ve run the same mp3s through about four different tools now, so maybe I should check a little more carefully. 😯

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. 🙂

cutmp3: More than it appears

At first glance, and even if you look at the help flag, cutmp3 appears fairly innocent. Don’t you believe it for a second.

Who knew a clever interface was hiding beneath that quiet demeanor? 😯

cutmp3 looks and plays like a graphical program, with controls to skim through the file, set start and end points, replay the selection, seek silence, copy out the file, and so forth.

On top of that, you can run it straight from the command prompt and send instructions as flags. Very convenient.

I have gotten so used to running classic, out-of-date or abandoned software at the console that I sometimes forget to check if something is still being maintained.

Apparently, cutmp3 had a new update about six months ago, which falls into the “actively developed” bracket. In my book, anyway. 🙄

So there you have it: an under-the-radar mp3 editor — not just a player, mind you, but an editor — with a clever interactive mode and recent updates.

Well, I count today as a good day, that’s for sure. 😉