[lug] Patching metadata in audiofiles

[Lori Reed]

On 11/17/2010 06:40 AM, Elyse M. Grasso wrote:

> I've got a bunch of cds -- mostly purchased from very small sources like
> directly from the performers -- that turn out to have missing or broken
> metadata when I rip them...

CDs have no metadata. Your ripping program has to get the tagging info 
from an online source, most likely freedb.org

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedb
http://www.freedb.org/

What you need is a quality gui based CD ripping tool that allows you to 
edit the tagging metadata before ripping. In all of Linuxdom, Asunder is 
the only one.

http://littlesvr.ca/asunder/

The various distro repositories tend to be a bit slow, but since v1.9.2 
Asunder has supported Genre editing, the next release (v2.0+) will 
probably include Year editing. I added Year editing over this past 
weekend, but have yet to merge my changes into the code base. A screen 
shot is available on my web site:

http://www.lightning-rose.com/projects/asunder.htm

If anyone wants a newer version not in your distros repository, let me 
know and I'll make it available.

> Can anyone recommend a preferred tool for patching audio file metadata?

First, I recommend against the previously suggested program, mp3info. It 
only supports ID3v1 tagging, which, although simple, is not very 
flexible and ignored by many mp3 players. (MP3 tagging in all versions 
is a nightmare, the people who defined it know not what they do)

It has it's issues, but the best audio (mp3, ogg, flac, and others) tag 
editor I've found is EasyTAG.

http://easytag.sourceforge.net/

> I don't
> mind re-ripping the cds if it's best to start from the wav files == I'm just
> beginning to rip my collection of world music, which seems to have most of the
> problems. The filkers seem to mostly get it right.
>
> Speaking of world music -- in the digitally  remastered versions of Kitaro's
> Silk Road albums, the metadata on volume 2 is fine, but the file names and
> presumably the metadata on volume 1 are showing in Japanese in Linux and not
> showing at all in Rockbox, even though I patched the filenames. So I'll be
> investigating the handling of UTF8 in Rockbox before I rip my koto and taiko
> cds, but I'll want to be able to add English metadata to any that are only in
> Japanese.

Again, the CDs have no metadata. Your CD ripper depends on what other 
users have uploaded to the online database. Use Asunder. Really. :)

On a related note, this past weekend I also released Select-o-Magic 3000 
v1.3.1

http://som3000.sourceforge.net/

There are many new and really nifty features since I presented it at the 
July meeting. You can track them in the release notes:

http://som3000.sourceforge.net/ReleaseNotes.txt

Also, I released a web app (javascript required) that makes it easy to 
create a Rot-13 spoiler with a URL to decode it, like so:

http://www.lightning-rose.com/projects/rot13.htm?Yvtugavat%20Ebfr%20qvq%20guvf%21

Lori