Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Amarok: id3 tags and me

If you're like me and (1) you have a large music collection and (2) you've copied data from an ipod off the harddrive, you've probably thought about renaming your music via the id3 tags.

For newbies, an id3 tag is part of the audio file that stores the title, artist, year, track #, genre, etc. Regardless of what the file is called, this data remains intact.
Now if you are familiar with an ipod, it stores mp3's in strange, 4 character names that make no readable sense.

I use (and swear by) GNU/Linux systems. AmaroK has done everything I've ever needed when it comes to audio especially when it comes to handling large collections.

Where is this leading to? I had over 60GB of audio that I copied from my ipod before I sold it for a superior Cowon machine. (D2+ anyone?)
I wanted all the music to be in the standard Artist - Title.ext format, but I can't rename all 60GB by hand. There used to be a python script I used before that would batch rename all my files to their id3 tags, but lost it after some reformatting, etc.
I've tried looking up other methods, id3ren is one of them, plus a python script someone posted on a forum. They worked very well for me, but I never actually realized amaroK had this functionality built in. It's not obvious at all!

So for those who use amaroK and want to convert the filenames to their id3 tag counterparts, here's the solution:

Select the mp3's you want to rename.

Right click, go to Manage Files -> Organize Files

It's flexable and easy, requiring no extra programs.
Being somewhat of an audiophile, I wish I could have known about this earlier.

Thanks to the folks at amaroK for showing me how.
Peon out.