Puddletag The Best ID3 Tag Editor

Posted on: December 3rd, 2011 by 3 Comments

Puddletag Screenshot

After a long and agonising search for the greatest ID3 tag editor for my Linux System Puddletag takes the throne. This powerful ID3 tag editor is better than the rest for many reasons. This excellent program just fixed my entire library of over 10,000 ID3 tags in under 3 hours.

Puddletag Info

Puddletag works with a highly customizable spreadsheet style interface allowing you to edit many ID3 tags at once. Many tag editors don’t work half as well for bulk operations.

More About Puddletag

The interface provides many preferences and customization options so you can create you own work environment.

Puddletag ID3 Converter Features

  • Puddletag uses python code and is said to work equally well under Mac OS X.
  • A Unique spreadsheet style interface that makes editing multiple tags at once very simple.
  • A highly customizable interface lets you create your own work environment and toggle different window panels.
  • Preview your album artwork with the artwork panel.

Puddletag ID3 Converter Menus

Though Puddletag has a large number of menus things are still fairly simple to navigate, and the menus are not very large. The menus are well-organized, many functions can also be completed using the toolbar to save time.

File

The File menu lets you open folders, or add folders to be edited, you can load or save playlists. You can also save the changes made to the current track or play the current track. If needed there are also options to delete a track, or delete without confirmation. And last you will find refresh to update any changes, a clear tracks option, and as always an exit option.

Edit

This menu provides a number of ways for you to interact with your files. You can undo your recent changes, or the current file’s extended tags and properties. Cut, copy and paste options are also available for text fields. You can also remove tags from the current file, you can switch directories, invert selection, select column, or select all. Move highlighted items up or down if you wish, and you can also change the Puddletag font size or see the other preferences.

Convert

From here you can manipulate your tags and files. First you can switch tags to filenames, or filenames to tags. You can even change the format used while naming. Directories can also be renamed, and you can retrieve tags from text files or the clipboard.

Actions

Here you can bring up the action dialog to customize macros that will automate much of the tagging process. A quick action option is also available. The functions option allows you to number tracks or do text case conversion.

Tools

The tools menu provides an auto-numbering wizard for your tracks. You can also import your music library, replace text, or change your directory sorting structure.

Preview Mode

You can enable or disable the preview mode which means changes will not get saved, unless you specify. If you make changes in preview mode, then clear the changes you can always undo your last clear. you can also set preview mode to write previews to disk if you prefer to do things that way. You can also clear the changes made to selected files, or selected cells.

Tag Tools

From this menu you can delete or remove many tag formats.

Windows

Allows you to toggle several different aspects of the main Puddletag window. For example, you can toggle the filter area, the tag panel, the artwork panel, the filesystem panel, the tag sources panel, the stored tags panel, the logs, the mass tagging area, or the functions and actions areas.

Help

The help menu will display Puddletag version/author information.

Puddletag ID3 Converter Tag Sources

Tags can also be edited using web sources such as Amazon, Discogs, and FreeDB. To use this feature first toggle the tag sources panel from the window menu. Then select your online source, enter text if required, and finally press search. When finished, retrieve your matches, and press write.

Tags: , , , , | Posted in Applications

  • Robert

    What is frustrating to me is the album artist tag vs song artist tag. A lot of times the album artist is “Various”, and then on my mp3 player, when looking up under Artist, all the cd’s artists are listed separately.

    My kludge for this is too make the Artist tag for a CD, say Wow 2011, to be “Wow 2011 artists”. I then will incorporate the track artist into the title, e.g., “What Faith Can Do by Kutless”. Not an ideal solution.

    You didn’t talk about Album art and this program. I have spent way too much time fiddling with Album art.

    Thanks for the review. I will forward it to my daughter whose music collection is even in worse shape than mine!

    • http://linuxlibrary.org thinkinhurtz

      Thanks for the comments Robert, I will be sure to add more information regarding album art as soon as possible. Sometime things are missed due to lack of time, but I always make requests the number one priority. Puddletag seems to be growing in popularity rather fast as well, so thanks again for bringing this to my attention. I hope to hear from you soon!

    • Uru

      Add a albumartist tag to your VA albums and set it to VA or whatever you like and leave the Artist tag set to the song artist. Another (preferred) option is to add a ‘compilation’ tag and set it to ’1′. Most decent media players will then group the tracks in the album as a compilation.