[Vorbis] Free tagging

[John Morton]

On Wednesday 23 August 2006 00:53, Stian Rødven Eide wrote:
>  Hello
>
>  I have been using Ogg Vorbis (and Flac) exclusively since I became aware
> of the patent issues surrounding all the other formats and have become very
> impressed by the flexibility of Ogg. Not being much of a programmer myself,
> I rely on existing applications to tag my ogg-files but have so far not
> found a program to change or enter a non-standard tag en masse. For
> example, I'd like to enter a tag like this
> "DownloadedFrom=http://prc.julipan.org" into all the music that is shared
> through our forum. There are some applications that do this for a single
> file at the time, like Audio Tag Tool
>  (http://pwp.netcabo.pt/paol/tagtool/), but this is unpractical for tagging
>  hundreds of files. I have also tried using the commandline-tool "lltag",
> but so far without results.
>
>  Seeing that Ogg supports any tag I can think of, I'd like to be able to
> use this feature but I'm out of applications to try... Can anyone enlighten
> this issue for me? I use Ubuntu Dapper and will avvoid proprietary programs
> whenever possible..

ExFalso is worth a look if you're happy to use an interactive tool:

http://www.sacredchao.net/quodlibet/wiki/Guide/ExFalso

It uses a python tagging library called mutagen, which has the advantage of 
not having any binary dependencies to do it's thing, which might actually be 
faster than using tools like py-vorbis or the vorbiscomment command line 
tool, as it won't try and scan the whole file, as the libvorbisfile 
initialisation tends to do (but I haven't done the timing tests).

If you can handle a little shell programming, you could do something with 
find, grep and vorbiscomment, eg:

find all the .ogg files under some starting directory,
for each file,
 - pipe vorbiscomment -l through grep to see if your tag is already present
 - if not, run vorbiscomment -a file.ogg -t "TAG=value"

John