 If you're anything like me you have a very large music collection stored somewhere on a hard drive And if you're also anything like me, it's an absolute mess when it comes to file names and metadata and all that stuff, right? Mine is atrocious like 99% of the stuff has no metadata whatsoever, like it's really bad now most that is because it was burned from CDs For those kids of you out there CDs are these little round things you used to put in a player and it would play music Before that we had cassette tapes and you had to rewind them with a pencil We'll get away from that now Anyways, that was kind of setting that you shouldn't have done that anyways The the point is is that they were all burned from CDs back when adding metadata wasn't really all that easy I mean this was back in the early 2000s when basically if you wanted to do this It was either some really janky like flash-based software or itunes and of course I used itunes and itunes would attach metadata Sometimes but only if you had the internet obviously and at that point I didn't have the internet So that was a very long story short to say that my metadata on my Local music collection is hot trash. It's really really really bad So I'm always kind of on the lookout for an easy way to fix that and I'm still kind of on the lookout But today I'm going to be talking about a really simple application To edit metadata for your music collection So this is a application called ear tag and when I first saw it, I didn't really know anything about it I just saw it on omg a boon too. I was like, wow, that's gonna be really cool And I should take a look at it So I stored it in one of my tabs to take a look at later and now I have so today We're gonna take a look at ear tag and I'll show you what I like and what I dislike about it So let's go ahead and jump in so this is ear tag and as you can see it is a gtk based application Ignore the fact that it's in light mode for whatever reason my gtk dark mode doesn't work in i3 I don't know what's going on there. We'll fix it later and overall your tag is a very Very simple application. So by default, all you can do is add a file So let's just choose an altar bridge file here. We'll open it up And the ones that you've selected up here in the left hand column you select it you edit the metadata. So let's just put this here as altar bridge like so And then you can hit the save button and it will save now that Track right there will now have A proper album artist attached to it. Now you can edit multiple files at once So if I wanted to select both of these files, I could then add altar bridge To both of these files and then hit save again And now they both have and now they both have altar bridge as the album artist and that's Seriously All ear tag does you can add a file edit the metadata save it and then move on to the next file Now here are things some things that I just like and the reason why I'm actually making this video because honestly If that's all it did and really that's all it does do I probably wouldn't make this video simply because well I mean, it's really simple and the video is not even four minutes long. I'm done Okay, there's nothing here. There's no settings. There's no preferences. There's nothing like that But I wanted to talk about some things that I I when I saw this program I was like, man, that's gonna be really cool because a lot of the Music tagging software that's out there is overly complicated And it is necessarily so because a lot of it has some Very advanced features like being able to search on online databases for the metadata and assign it to the appropriate places That's really cool. A lot of the ones that do that Are really cool, but they're overly complicated like the the kde one I don't remember the name has a ton of features because it's a kde epa course it does But you know, it has a ton of features and it's just I don't need anything that complex I just want to be able to do this. But there are a few things here that just make this Disappointing to me. So the first one is adding tracks or adding multiple tracks seems to be impossible. So if you hit the plus button here Can you add more than one? I guess you actually can add more than one I But you can't add you have to select the tracks individually I don't think you can add Directories. So if I went back to the altar bridge one and just selected all of these If I opened up all of those would that actually do anything? I don't think that it would And no, it wouldn't so you have to add them by tracks I would love to add them by directories by or by full albums So I can just add all of these and I could just go through one by one now I understand kind of why they don't do that because it could get confusing and there's no nested way of displaying The things that are here So in order for multiple albums to be shown here There'd have to be some nesting here in order to show what's a track what's an album and so on They don't have any of that. So that's not here So I can understand why they haven't done it, but it's a little bit disappointing to me The other thing that I kind of want is album art searching like I don't want to have to go to Like I understand not being able to search, you know, like do a music identification or whatever it's called music ID Whatever it's called genre ID, you know listening to the track and then going finding the information for me I understand the automation stuff isn't there. I didn't want that I wanted a simple application But once you've entered the album name, it'd be really cool if it just Did a search in the background and pull in that album art for you because honestly I have most of the information already stored Inside of my file. So I know what the album is called. I know what the artist is I know what the name of the track is called and I don't really care about the release date Or you know the release here I mean if I happen to know it or if it's happens to be part of the album Directory file name or whatever I can put that in there myself. So all that stuff is very easy for me to do I may not get the track number right Again, not that big of a deal But I would love to have the album art because that would that actually Necessitates me going out of ear tag going to firefox finding the album art and then uploading it, you know clicking this and uploading and stuff like that It's not it's not ideal. So that's the one feature honestly that I Truly am disappointed that this doesn't have so I know all like half this video Has been me saying, oh my god, this thing's so bad. No, you shouldn't use it. No, that's not what I'm saying It's very simple. And if all you ever want to do is edit music tags Or edit metadata, I should say on your music This is a fantastic option for you if you just need to do a few I don't think that it would work for me to do my music collection simply because I mean if we take a look at my music collection here just go out of their altar bridge I have a ton of stuff here And uh, yeah I mean you can see I mean obviously this is only like half of it too So there's a lot of music here that I'd have to go through one by one And then you'll find the album art and it would be kind of a mess. So I don't I would need some of the automation that I was not wanting Specifically when it comes to album art for this to be work worthwhile for me But outside of that And yes, you're getting a peek into some of my Half mediocre music tastes. I can't you know, whatever It's eclectic. What can I say? So yeah, that's it for ear tag It's it's a good application don't I am not At all bashing the the application or the developers of this application No, that's not what I'm doing here More I'm bashing my expectations going in. That's really what I'm doing I wanted it to do more and it didn't do more and that's a little bit disappointing, but outside of my dashed expectations The simplicity of this app is actually really good if all you need to do is edit, you know an album or two This is fantastic. It's like really good. It runs really well There it doesn't have any of the extraneous features that a lot of the other tag metadata editor things Have so if all you want is a simple music editor This is a good one. So that's it for this video if you have thoughts on this You can leave those in the comment section below. Maybe I missed something and That's always possible. So comment section below for those kind of comments You can follow me on mastodon or odyssey those links will be in the video description You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash linux cast Support links for libera pay and youtube will be in the video description if you'd like to support me there Thanks everybody who does support me on patreon youtube. You guys are all absolutely amazing I truly do appreciate it You guys are all absolutely amazing people without you the challenge does not be anywhere near where it is right now So thank you so very very much for your support. Like I said, I truly appreciate it and uh, yeah, thanks everybody for watching I'll see you next time