Edit Audio Metadata on Linux (Any Distro)

Intro

Music is a major factor part of everyone's lives.

It can be accessed from any device that's close by.

Whether it's a smartphone, laptop, or television, there's no empty spot to where it wouldn't be found.

Gone are the days where carrying your portable CD player was necessary to listen on-the-go (though I do miss those things).

Listening to your favorite track can be fine and dandy, but what if you cannot track it down?

If the musical content did not have the proper information from the song, then it's going to be difficult to extract any information besides the melodic tune.

The Issue

Music listeners tend to enjoy saving their music onto their devices locally.

They would either download it and store the content offline, not having to worry about any connection barriers.

Typically, people do this and not do anything else with their discography.

But it can easily become cluttered over time.

What I mean is music that isn't managed initially becomes disorganized because it is missing the essential information.

The data that really matters for the user is missing when they don't tidy up:

How can this be missing if the user knows the songs that they have downloaded?

How music information is stored

On each music file, information is stored in the form of metadata.

Metadata is important for audio playback software (VLC, iTunes, etc.).

Without the metadata, the software does not know what song is being played.

It will still play it, but be categorized as an unknown track.

When to be concerned about metadata?

If you legally purchase your music, metadata will be intact.

Listening to your music on the cloud with services such as SoundCloud gives you the information that you need.

But if it's acquired by other means, then it might be missing.

Especially if you modify the song's bitrate, then it will definitely be discarded.

Thus, it is important to familiarize yourself with methods that let you edit the metadata in a flash.

Thanks to modern applications, it does not require having arcane knowledge of computers.

Especially when you have a ton of songs that haven't been properly categorized, the tools I'll reveal let you seamlessly control what goes on and off in your music.

Music isn't the only thing that can be tweaked; videos can as well.

They can be converted, compressed, and retargeted with a different pitch of sound.

I made a simple tutorial going over this.

Resources

Commands

install EasyTAG and SoundConverter

sudo apt install soundconverter easytag

Conclusion

Hopefully, this tutorial shows you the basics to get you up and running with labeling your music.

You should now be well-equipped and have an organized discography.

Managing your metadata doesn't get any easier than this!

Especially on Linux, there's nothing in comparison to the combination of what EasyTAG and SoundConverter have to offer.

It's a simple, but powerful way to keep your music files intact.

What will you be listening to?