http://home.wanadoo.nl/~w.speek/tag.htm
Tag 1.303
Tag frontend v1.4

Tag is a small console tool to write tags in various compressed audio files [mpc, mp3, ogg vorbis..].

It gets the tag information from filename so in best case you don't need to type anything. It features also powerful file renamer so you can rename those downloaded mp3s to naming scheme you like. And it can generate m3u playlists from your songs. You can sort the list by track number, name or song length. Generated playlists also have AlbumList extensions and song durations.

Currently Tag supports ID3v1.1, Lyrics3 v2.0 and APE v1.0, APE v2.0. Oggs are supported if VorbisComment is found in the path. Tag is made by Case (email: case at mobiili.net)

Tag frontend is a Windows frontend for Tag. You need both programs, Tag and Tag frontend, to get things working. Both programs are freeware and very small downloads.

What's new in Tag Frontend v1.4:
* Two modes: Files or Directory. In Directory mode you can also include subdirectories (recursive).
* Added --autoscheme and --ape2 options
* Genres are no longer saved in a seperate file. You can delete the file Genres.cfg if you're upgrading.
* Many GUI changes
* Added newly supported file formats to the Add Files dialog
* Help button

What exactly is the difference and benefit, if any, of APE 2.0 over 1.0? The winamp plugin supports both, but there seems to be no difference between the two interfaces. Will APE 2.0 eventually be the support for the detailed tag info dialog image that's on Frank's website?

Q for Frank: Is it possible to add support for APE tags to the encoder? Specifically, I'm converting from APE format to musepack and the tags aren't transfered because none of the pieces seem smart enough to keep or pass along the info. Functionality like that added with the mpcenct utility to write basic APE tag info might also be nice to have directly in the encoder. Does this make sense to do, or does this functionality really make better sense remaining outside of the encoder?

EDIT: Still for Frank: An additional feature it would be good to have in the encoder is support for the mac decompressor to reside in the path instead of having to be in the current directory of a command line window. mppenc will not decode APE files unless you run mppenc from its home directory or a directory with mac.exe in it.

Thanks,
G

Hmm, better put the questions to Frank to the MPC forum, or for 100% certainty email him.

The most important difference for SV8 support is header in APE 2.0. It is required for streaming to work well, otherwise tag data would be considered as audio data for players. Other significant change is UTF-8 encoding of values, that way every language can be used to write data.


Check your path variable, maybe you have original non-modified mac.exe lying somewhere. Direct encoding from APE works from every directory when correct mac.exe is in path.

Would this be useful? I could add it to the mppenc wrapper in around 5 min. I mean would you save a lot of time if this was implemented?

/Erik

This would be so incredibly helpful. I've got a bunch of CD's that I only encoded into Monkey's to save time so I could return CD's quicker. I had assumed everything would work seamlessly and pass the APE tags along. Silly Me.

Cool, thanks, I'll check on my path. It shouldn't have that anywhere, but maybe Monkey's installer did something.

G

ok, then... it's done. check your email. Just be a bit careful first when testing it, because i haven't checked if it actually works as it is supposed to (i dont have frank's updated mac.exe yet)

/Erik

Case, Speek -

An idea/feature request: Would it be possible to add a feature to the tagger/frontend enabling two (or more) "A" levels?

I'm going to re-tag about 200 CD's and have my folders alphabetized like this: "Lastname, Firstname - (YEAR) Album". I'd love to do this conversion (to APE 1.0 from ID3 1.1) automatically, but I don't really want the artist field to be "Springsteen, Bruce" or "Smashing Pumpkins, The".

So I had this idea: you specify A2, A1 - (Y) L, and the tagger automatically places the A's in numerical order within the artist field (possibly with an option to add a space between them).

Possible? Bad idea? Good idea? That's up to you to decide.

Cheers

Uosdwis

PS. Also, an option to ingore the first zero for "N" would be useful (so the tracknumber says "2" instead of "02").

Hi all.

If we're in feature request mode then case/speek could you please add the essential 'capitalise first letter of each word' function to what is already a great utility!

Thanks guys,

B-J

This function has been around for quite some time. In frontend it's called Capitalize words and from command line it's used with option --caps.


Uosdwis:
I'll add both features. You can expect updated version soon.

New version of Tag uploaded. I added the features requested by Uosdwis. To ignore the leading zeros or remove them from already tagged files use option --nozero. And to fix comma separation in artist field use option --commafix. Get Tag 1.305.

I'm stunned! Thanks a lot, Case! :beer:

/ Uosdwis

Could you make an easy option to replace '_' by ' ' in filenames? I got some problems with auto-detacting filesheme.

Can you type the name of your file and directory it's in here, maybe I can help with scheme selection.
Anyway, new version with --spacefix is uploaded. Version is now 1.307.

Thank you!
The files "AlbumArtist-This_Is_Trackname" were a Problem.
Well, I found that I can change the autodetection-scheme, then it was easy to add 'LA-T' before 'LA_T'.

Case,

I retagged my files this morning, about 2000 of them, in a matter of minutes all thanks to you (and Speek!). All went well except the folders where the act/artist consists of more than one person, or is one person + band. Example: "Neil Young and Crazy Horse", which I catalog as "Young, Neil and Crazy Horse", becomes "Neil and Crazy Horse Young".

Now this didn't cause much trouble, and I can certainly live with it (my mission is completed now anyway), but in case you want to perfect it I thought I'd mention it.

Thanks again!

/ Uosdwis

Thanks for feedback! I can add check in commafix for word "and" and character "&" after comma that disable rearranging of words. I think this would solve problems like that.

Update: New version with updated commafix uploaded. It should detect if artist field is a list and do nothing then.

To Tag frontend: It would be better if the file-list would update after renaming, so you don't have to remove the files from list an add them again if you want to tag the files afterwards.

You are correct, it would be very good feature. Currently it would be impossible to add because frontend does not know the new names. If Speek can add support for reading filenames from file I can modify Tag to write new names to the file and your suggestion would work.

I have not the slightest idea of how to do that. There's no communication from Tag.exe to the frontend, so how can the frontend know the new name?

Well, Tag writes the new filname in an .cfg-file and Tag frontend is reading it when Tag is ready. I hope that is possible :confused:

It should be. I have already made preliminary suggestion about this to Speek and am currently adding the feature to Tag.

Looks Nice. Although I am a new user I still greatly appreciate the work Speek does. I would like to request that a feature be added which is to look up these songs to recieve album information. I realize that songs do come from more then one album but, this would come closer to accuracy in tag information. I've also noticed that it doesn't do anything to mpc files. I'm sure that it probably does I'm just not sure how to go about having it write tags for mpc files Thanks Jeff please keep in mind when reading this that I'm new to all this stuff.

I would add freedb support if I knew how to access internet. I don't know anything about programming for Windows. If someone can help with this I'll add it.

You are probably using directory mode in Frontend. Use "file type" to select *.mpc or *.* and things should start working.

Again, many thanks.

Is there any way to sort by logical name order, rather than by numerical order? Currently files named according to etree standards do not order properly...

If files are named "djlogic_trios2002-02-07d2t01.mpc" and "djlogic_trios2002-02-07d2t010.mpc" they will appear in this order (with tracks 11-19 following) before track "djlogic_trios2002-02-07d2t02.wav" is listed-resulting in a file list that does not go in sequence...

Are you talking about file tagging or playlist creation? Only playlist creation has some sort functions in use, all other functions just use the order files are on disk. It will take some time to make all other functions sort too, but I can try to get it done tomorrow if that's what you need.

I am talking about playlist creation...

Please don't put yourself out on my account-you have already assisted me in ways I could never reciprocate (and, as I said, I was only referring to sorting files to create a playlist). Thanks.

I'm glad, playlist sorting is easy to modify New version is uploaded and it should do the sorting like you wanted.

Many thanks, Case-I will give it a whirl when I get home from work...

I've had time to run the new version through a bit of the gauntlet, and everything works as it should: sorting by name handles filenames with numbers properly now. If only everybody sharing shorten files would adhere to the adopted naming standards...

I uploaded a new version of Tag supporting reading of ID3v2 tags by using id3lib. This could be handy for someone to convert ID3v2 tags to APE. I keep this version in separate zip, it's too bloated because of the library. Download Tag 1.33.