Monday, October 24, 2011

Application Review: Puddletag for Linux (installed in Ubuntu 10.04)

Puddletag is an audio tag editor that I stumbled upon while browsing through the WebUPd8 PPA for Ubuntu Linux. While not an application I was looking for at the time, it did fill a need for me.

I have a number of MP3 files that do not have meta tag data entered. And while this worked fine in my car stereo MP3 player that only read file names, virtually all modern music players I have used as of late rely on this data for display. So, wanting to sort my music for playback on my computer I would need this data entered. I had previously used a Windows based program called "Stamp" which wasn't very quick, and doesn't fit anymore as I use a Linux system for my personal computer and want to find a native Linux application for all my computing needs.

The interface of Puddletag is simple and efficient. Browse for your media location on the left hand side and on the right you are greeted with a spreadsheet like view of all the editable fields (file name, artist, title, album etc...). This view is very easy to work with and will even let you copy and paste a field over multiple files (say album title).

I did find that some operations are night lightning quick, but that could be a combination of editing files on a USB hard drive and my older Pentium 4 system. It is by no means unbearably slow, and plenty tolerable to use. I have started working on my collection and will continue till the last of my files have been edited and ready to load up in my music player. I would highly recommend giving Puddletag a try if you have need to edit meta data on any audio files.

Puddeltag is available in the WebUpd8 PPA or from the developers SourceForge site. Give it a try, I doubt you will be disappointed.

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