A short note today, to mention that EasyTag, the audio file renamer tool, won another fan recently — this time, an iPod owner.
I have to say up front that I know next to nothing about iPods, and I intend to keep it that way. There is no joy like being able to deflect iPod questions, by virtue of not knowing anything about them. 🙄
In any case, the iPod owner, who is also an Ubuntu user, wanted to move the entire collection off the iPod without having to rely on the iTunes utility.
Something about the utility arbitrarily deleting music files in the process of “synchronizing” with the owner’s list of approved titles. Again, I don’t know how those things work.
Apparently Ubuntu would mount the device and the files could be pulled off, but the file names were scrambled — renamed to a number sequence, and out of the original folder structure.
How inconvenient. Steve Jobs strikes again.
In any case, that’s where I suggested EasyTag as a mass renamer, using the tag information embedded in the files to restore them to their original state.
And apparently, after a little experimentation, everything is back to the way it was. EasyTag to the rescue.
I suppose I should close with brief tirade against proprietary music players and any machine that transfers control of your product to some corporation … but that would be overkill, now wouldn’t it?
Let’s just leave that last part unsaid. Suffice to say, I never had that problem with this player. 😈
A gold smiley for EasyTag: 😀
>any machine that transfers control of your product to some corporation …
Yep, Apple does too much to get control of your data…
From another side, doesn’t Google do the same in Android?
EasyTag can only view certain metadata fields (title, artist, album, year, track, genre, comment, composer, original artist, copyright, URL, and encoded by); with puddletag, you can view ALL metadata embedded in audio files. The trouble is, even standard, rules-abiding id3v2 tags can contain a lot more metadata than that. I find that the inability to view that data in EasyTag to be a serious shortcoming.
Puddletag, on the other hand, lets you view ALL the metadata embedded in a file, and lets you configure how much of it you want displayed in your main work window. FWIW, while I found EasyTag’s “workflow” to be fine once I got used to the program, Puddletag is probably easier to use even if it has a lot more options (for instance, you don’t need to save every edit to a file, nor do you need to specifically tell puddletag to apply those changes to more than one file at a time when you have multiple files selected). Anyway, puddletag’s worth a look!