high on solder

As you may or may not know MP3 files have a tagging system built into them that allows you to provide MP3 playing software and devices information about the song being played (artist, album, track, song title, year recorded, etc.) beyond that provided by the filename itself. Since most of my music library I did not copy and encode from CDs myself, the tags in each file are not consistent in quality. This creates a problem when songs are loaded onto an MP3 player or into library based music software (iTunes, Songbird, Amarok, Rhythmbox, etc.). For example I have a folder of music by The Beatles; but the artist tags for these files range from Beatles, to The Beatles, to Beatles, The. So instead of one band listing, I have three; definitely not a desirable situation. I also wanted to find some good music ripping, encoding, and converting software for Linux to deal with any new CDs I want to add to my collection. After a fair amount of research on the web I found a lot of very useful programs built into the Ubuntu repositories that can perform all the tasks I need.

Tagging Tools

• EasyTag - Scans your music folder(s) and can use simple scripts or CD databases to fill in missing tag information
• Audio Tag Tool - Similar to EasyTag, but with a simpler interface, faster performance and less features

Ripping/Conversion Tools

• Sound Juicer- Installed in Ubuntu by default, can encode to FLAC and OGG Vorbis out of the box, can't encode CDs to MP3 format without additional libraries installed, fast
• SoundConverter - I use this to convert FLAC to MP3, very simple to use, reasonably fast

You may be wondering why I don't just rip my CDs directly to MP3. FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) is an open-source compression technique that maintains the audio quality of the original CD while being smaller in file size. By ripping CDs to FLAC I then have the flexibility to later convert them to whatever format I wish without having to re-rip the CD.