We’re spoilt for choice when it comes to audio tag editors for Linux, but ever heard the expression ‘sometimes less is more’?
It sounds silly but hey: it’s a maxim that resonates with me.
Take Ear Tag, a new music tag editor for Linux written in Python and using GTK4/libadwaita. Its a simple, straightforward tool that lets you quickly edit audio tags for individual music files.
Unlike fully-featured MP3 tag editors like Kid3, Tagger, or MusicBrainz Picard, Ear Tag doesn’t try to manage your entire music library. And though it can edit metadata for multiple audio files at once it’s primarily designed around the task of tweaking individual music files in turn.
Sometimes I notice a misspelt artist name in an MP3 I’m putting on to an SD card for a friend, or spot a single audio file that somehow doesn’t have embedded artwork (despite the rest of the album having it) – in these situations I don’t want to squint at something akin to a spreadsheet to find the field I need to tweak.
I just want to edit one field in one file. It should be easy, right?
With Ear Tag it is.
Open the app, click the ‘+’ icon, and open the audio file(s) to edit. Select the track to edit on the left-hand side, and tweak the track name, album title, artist, track number, genre, release year in the right hand side.
To add/change album artwork click on the album art to open a file picker through which you can select the artwork you wish to use.
With all edit(s) made, hit the ‘save’ button to write the changes to audio file.
Ear Tag also lets you can edit tags for multiple files at the same time. You just open/load the tracks, then click the “select” icon in the toolbar to enter multi-select mode. Check the audio files to edit, adjust the relevant values, and hit ‘save’ to write the changes back to the audio file.
That’s pretty much all it does, and all it needs to: simplicity has its charm. I like that the info pane shows a bit of extra detail for a given track, such as track duration, audio format, and audio quality in kbps.
Want to try Ear Tag yourself?
You can find Ear Tag on Flathub, making it easy to install on most modern Linux distributions, Ubuntu included. If you’re on an Arch-based distro you may prefer to install Ear Tag from the AUR. Source code is up on Github.