tagutil(1) is a CLI tool to edit music file's tag. It aims to provide both an easy-to-script interface and ease of use interactively. Unlike most other tag tools out there, it fully support Vorbis Comments for both ogg/vorbis files and FLAC. Vorbis Comments are sexy, because you can set tags with any key/value without much restrictions (you can even have more than one value for a key).

• pkg-config (build dep)
• cmake >= 2.6 (build dep)
• libyaml

Optionals dependencies are detected by cmake. If you want to override the detection you can define WITHOUT_$LIB to avoid tagutil to link against $LIB.

• JSON: jansson JSON output format.
• FLAC: libFLAC If you want the flac files to be handled by libFLAC.
• OGGVORBIS: libvorbis If you want the ogg/vorbis files to be handled by libvorbis.
• TAGLIB: TagLib (>=1.5) Generic backend. Can handle a lot of different file type, but only a limited set of tags (artist, title, album, tracknumber, date, genre and comment).
• ID3V1: A stock ID3v1.1 TAG backend. ID3v1 is only used by very old mp3 files and has a lot of limitation including: limited set of tags, limited length (30 characters at the most), genre has to be part of the ID3v1 list (this backend support the Winamp extended list though) etc.

type make, it'll create the build/ directory and call cmake and make to configure and build tagutil. Or if you want to gives some arguments to cmake do (for example):

mkdir build && cd build
cmake -DWITHOUT_TAGLIB=yes ../src
make

build tagutil, then cd build && make install. You might need root access to call make install.

A package is provided in the AUR. Use your favorite AUR helper to install it or download the AUR tarball and run makepkg -si to build and install the package.

Use the print action. Since it is the default action, you can omit it from the command line:

% tagutil fearless.flac
# fearless.flac
---
- album: Meddle
- artist: Pink Floyd
- date: 1971
- title: Fearless
- tracknumber: 03
- genre: Progressive Rock

There are commands for basic editing stuff like clear, add and set. If you need to do something more complex, the edit action let you use your favourite $EDITOR.

One powerful feature of tagutil is the rename action. It rename the music files after inferring the new name from a rename pattern. In the rename pattern, %{name} is replaced by the name tag. You can also use the simpler form %name if the tag is only composed of alphanumeric characters. Example:

% tagutil -p rename:"[%date] %artist/%tracknumber - %title" fearless.flac
rename `fearless.flac' to `[1971] Pink Floyd/03 - Fearless.flac'? [y/n]

tagutil can easily be scripted. Basic scripts can use the editing actions while more complex scripts can use print, parse the output, do some modifications and then use load. There are two examples in the scripts/ directory:

• scripts/tagutil-track: this simple Perl script will take a tag name and some files as arguments, and will set 01 for the first file, 02 for the second and so on. Useful to set the track number of an album.
• scripts/tagutil-trim: this Ruby script is a bit more complex and is an example using YAML parsing. What is does is very simple though, it just trim every tags of leading and trailing white space(s).

% tagutil -h
tagutil v3.0

usage: tagutil [OPTION]... [ACTION:ARG]... [FILE]...
Modify or display music file's tag.

Options:
  -h     show this help
  -p     create destination directories if needed (used by rename)
  -F fmt use the fmt format for print, edit and load actions (see Formats)
  -Y     answer yes to all questions
  -N     answer no  to all questions

Actions:
  print            print tags (default action)
  backend          print the backend used (see Backend)
  clear:TAG        clear all tag TAG. If TAG is empty, all tags are cleared
  add:TAG=VALUE    add a TAG=VALUE pair
  set:TAG=VALUE    set TAG to VALUE
  edit             prompt for editing
  load:PATH        load PATH yaml tag file
  rename:PATTERN   rename to PATTERN

Formats:
         yml: YAML - YAML Ain't Markup Language
        json: JSON - JavaScript Object Notation

Backends:
     libFLAC: Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) files format
   libvorbis: Ogg/Vorbis files format
      TagLib: various file format but limited set of tags

% gem install bundler
% make test

It is a BSD 2-Clause license, see LICENSE.