Tagging MP3 Files with Puddletag on Linux Mint

Tuesday, March 23, 2021 

A “fun” part of organizing an MP3 collection is harmonizing the tags so the datas work consistently with whatever management schema you prefer.  My preference is management by the file system—genre/artist/year/album/tracks works for me—but consistent metainformation is required and often disharmonious.  Finding metaharmony is a chore I find less taxing with a well structured tag editor and to my mind the ur-meta-tag manager is  MP3TAG.

The problem is that only works with that dead-end spyware riddled failing legacyware called “Windows.” Fortunately, in Linux-land we have puddletag, a very solid clone of MP3TAG.  The issues is that the version in repositories is (as of this writing) 1.20 and I couldn’t find a PPA for the latest, 2.0.1.  But compiling from source is super easy and works in both Linux Mint 19 and Ubuntu 20.04 (yay open source!):

  1. Install pre-reqs to build (don’t worry, if they’re installed, they won’t be double installed)
  2. get the tarball of the source code
  3. expand it (into a reasonable directory, like ~/projects)
  4. switch into that directory
  5. run the python executable “puddletag” directly to verify it is working
  6. install it
  7. tell the desktop manager it’s there – and it should be in your window manager along with the rest of your applications.

The latest version as of this post was 2.0.1 from https://github.com/puddletag/puddletag

sudo apt install python3-pyqt5 python3-pyqt5.qtsvg python3-pyparsing python3-mutagen python3-acoustid libchromaprint-dev libchromaprint-tools libchromaprint1 
wget href="https://github.com/puddletag/puddletag/releases/download/2.0.1/puddletag-2.0.1.tar.gz 
tar -xvf puddletag-2.0.1.tar.gz
cd puddletag-2.0.1/ 
cd puddletag 
./puddletag 
sudo python3 setup.py install 
sudo desktop-file-install puddletag.desktop

A nice feature is the configuration directory is portable and takes your complete customization with you – it is an extremely customizable program so you can generally configure it as fits your mental model.  Just copy the entire puddletag directory located at ~/.configure/puddletag.

Posted at 15:19:01 GMT-0700

Category: AudioHowToLinuxPositiveReviews