adding metadata to mp3 files

I am currently adding metadata to a lot of music files. Often they are grouped in a directory, based on their album.

arty artist
├── first album
│  ├── 01 some title.mp3
│  ├── 02 other title.mp3
│  └── 03 third title.mp3
└── songs for cooking
   ├── 01 Soßenlöffel.mp3
   └── 02 Küchentüre.mp3

(I was young when CDs were they way to acquire music. I don’t even know if todays music is still released in albums.)

But often these files have no metadata attached to them, so I need to read the data from the file’s path and write them into the metadata. The path arty artist/songs for cooking/01 Soßenlöffel.mp3 should translate into the following metadata:

As seen in this example, we will have spaces and umlauts in our paths (as well as apostrophes and other nasty characters).

If my music collection was more consistently named I would just write a script for all of this. But it is not: Sometimes there are track numbers, some songs do not belong to any album and sometimes the song is a collaboration of different artists.

So I had to semi-automate: I wrote a few commands that would do most of the work for me, but I applied them individually where I saw fit. This required more manual work but resulted in more consistence and correctness I believe.

The core of the following were two programs that allow setting metadata to audiofiles:

• mp3info (which is outdated but has a nice command line interface)
• tageditor (which is more modern, but prints more information then necessary in my opinion)

I used mp3info before I found tageditor. I will provide versions for both programms in the following, but if you have the choice: Just use tageditor.

Set the title from filename

tageditor version

ls | while read filename; do title=${filename%".mp3"}; tageditor set --values title="$title" --files "$filename"; done

mp3info version

ls | while read filename; do title=${filename%".mp3"}; mp3info -t "$title" "$filename"; done

Set the album from the directory name

(Use from within the directory.)

tageditor version

tageditor set --values album="$(basename "$(pwd)")" --files *

mp3info version

mp3info -l "$(basename "$(pwd)")" *

Set the artist for all the files below directory

All the files in this directory or subdirectory will be taged as having the artist Arty Artist. This worked best for me when using fd, because it behaves nicer then find.

tageditor version

fd --extension=mp3 --type=file --exec tageditor set --values artist="Arty Artist" --files {}

mp3info version

fd --extension=mp3 --type=file --exec mp3info -a "Arty Artist" {}

Set the track number from filename

mp3info version

ls | while read filename; do track="$(echo $filename | awk '{ print $1 }')"; mp3info -n "$track" "$filename"; done