Tag editor

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DigiKam, an image tag editor DigiKam 7.6.0 screenshot.png
DigiKam, an image tag editor
MusicBrainz Picard, a tag editor MusicBrainz Picard 2.7 screenshot.png
MusicBrainz Picard, a tag editor

A tag editor is an app that can add, edit, or remove embedded metadata on multimedia file formats. Content creators, such as musicians, photographers, podcasters, and video producers, may need to properly label and manage their creations, adding such details as title, creator, date of creation, and copyright notice.

Contents

Content creation apps can add metadata to the files they create. Tag editors, however, are apps dedicated to processing metadata, such as DigiKam and MusicBrainz Picard. Their features go beyond manual editing of individual files, offering batch processing and semi-automatic content identification.

Audio files editing techniques

Manual

Media players such as iTunes, Foobar2000 or Winamp, as well as dedicated tag editing programs allow users to manually edit tag and song file information, including composer and release year. Dedicated tag editors may feature batch processing and creating tags from file names and vice versa.

Online music databases

One type of tag editor compares the existing metadata in an audio file's tags with the information from online music databases, such as Gracenote, Discogs, freedb, Zortam Music Internet Database (ZMLIMD) or MusicBrainz. Once a match is found, complementary metadata information may be downloaded. This process is semi-automatic because more than one match may be found. [1]

Acoustic fingerprinting

An acoustic fingerprint is a unique code generated from an audio waveform. Depending upon the particular algorithm, acoustic fingerprints can be used to automatically categorize or identify an audio sample. Practical uses of acoustic fingerprinting include broadcast monitoring, identification of music and ads being played, [2] peer-to-peer network monitoring, sound effect library management, and video identification.

Hash function

In hash function, for audio identification, such as finding out whether an MP3 file matches one of a list of known items, one could use a conventional hash function such as MD5, but this would be very sensitive to highly likely perturbations such as time-shifting, CD read errors, different compression algorithms or implementations or changes in volume. Using something like MD5 is useful as a first pass to find exactly-identical files, but another, more advanced algorithm is required to find all items that would nonetheless be interpreted as identical by a human listener.

List of tag editors

The following is a list of tag editors. Media players generally have tag editing capabilities and are not included.

Audio files

Image files

Video files

Related Research Articles

Monkey's Audio is an algorithm and file format for lossless audio data compression. Lossless data compression does not discard data during the process of encoding, unlike lossy compression methods such as Advanced Audio Coding, MP3, Vorbis, and Opus. Therefore, it may be decompressed to a file that is identical to the source material.

foobar2000 Freeware audio player

foobar2000 is a freeware audio player for Microsoft Windows, iOS and Android developed by Peter Pawłowski. It has a modular design, which provides user flexibility in configuration and customization. Standard "skin" elements can be individually augmented or replaced with different dials and buttons, as well as visualizers such as waveform, oscilloscope, spectrum, spectrogram (waterfall), peak and smoothed VU meters. foobar2000 offers third-party user interface modifications through a software development kit (SDK).

Musepack or MPC is an open source lossy audio codec, specifically optimized for transparent compression of stereo audio at bitrates of 160–180 kbit/s. It was formerly known as MPEGplus, MPEG+ or MP+.

ReplayGain is a proposed technical standard published by David Robinson in 2001 to measure and normalize the perceived loudness of audio in computer audio formats such as MP3 and Ogg Vorbis. It allows media players to normalize loudness for individual tracks or albums. This avoids the common problem of having to manually adjust volume levels between tracks when playing audio files from albums that have been mastered at different loudness levels.

WavPack is a free and open-source lossless audio compression format and application implementing the format. It is unique in the way that it supports hybrid audio compression alongside normal compression which is similar to how FLAC works. It also supports compressing a wide variety of lossless formats, including various variants of PCM and also DSD as used in SACDs, together with its support for surround audio.

Gapless playback is the uninterrupted playback of consecutive audio tracks, such that relative time distances in the original audio source are preserved over track boundaries on playback. For this to be useful, other artifacts at track boundaries should not be severed either. Gapless playback is common with compact discs, gramophone records, or tapes, but is not always available with other formats that employ compressed digital audio. The absence of gapless playback is a source of annoyance to listeners of music where tracks are meant to segue into each other, such as some classical music, progressive rock, concept albums, electronic music, and live recordings with audience noise between tracks.

Music Player Daemon (MPD) is a free and open source music player server. It plays audio files, organizes playlists and maintains a music database. In order to interact with it, a client program is needed. The MPD distribution includes mpc, a simple command line client.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Music on Console</span> Console audio player

Music On Console (MOC) is an ncurses-based console audio player for Linux/UNIX. It was originally written by Damian Pietras, and is currently maintained by John Fitzgerald. It is designed to be powerful and easy to use, with an interface inspired by the Midnight Commander console file manager. The default interface layout comprises a file list in the left pane with the playlist on the right. It is configurable with customizable key bindings, color schemes and interface layouts. MOC comes with several themes defined in text files, which can be modified to create new layouts. It supports ALSA, OSS or JACK outputs.

cmus Console audio player

cmus is a small and fast console audio player for Unix-like operating systems. cmus is distributed under the terms of the GPL-2.0-or-later and operates exclusively through a text-based user interface, built with ncurses.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">EasyTag</span> Tag editor

EasyTag is a graphical tag editor that is part of the GNOME project. EasyTag runs on Linux and Microsoft Windows, and there was an attempt to bring EasyTAG to OS X circa 2014. It is written in C and relies on GTK+ and id3lib for graphics and ID3 tag handling respectively. As of version 2.1.1, EasyTag also uses the tag manipulation library provided by the MAD project, for support of ID3v2.4.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mp3tag</span>

Mp3tag is a metadata tag editor that supports many popular audio file formats. It is freeware for Microsoft Windows, while it costs USD $19.99 for Apple macOS in the Mac App Store.

aTunes Open source audio player

aTunes is a free and open source audio player with MPlayer as its playback engine. aTunes supports MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and other formats. aTunes allows users to edit tags, organize music and rip audio CDs easily.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sansa Fuze</span> SanDisk portable media player

The Sansa Fuze is a portable media player developed by SanDisk and released on March 8, 2008. The Fuze is available in three different Flash memory capacities: 2 GB, 4 GB, and 8 GB and comes in six different colors: black, blue, pink, red, silver, and white. Storage is expandable via a microSDHC slot with capacity up to 32 GB, and unofficially to 64 GB or more via FAT32 formatted SDXC cards. All models have a 1.9 inch TFT LCD display with a resolution of 220 by 176 pixels and a built-in monaural microphone and FM tuner; recordings of the latter two are saved as PCM WAV files.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SUPER (computer program)</span> Front-end for video players and encoders

Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Recorder (SUPER) is a closed-source adware front end for open-source software video players and encoders provided by the FFmpeg, MEncoder, MPlayer, x264, ffmpeg2theora, musepack, Monkey's Audio, True Audio, WavPack, libavcodec, and the Theora/Vorbis RealProducer plugIn projects. It was first released in 2005. SUPER provides a graphical user interface to these back-end programs, which use a command-line interface.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MusicBee</span> Media player for Microsoft Windows

MusicBee is a freeware media player for playback and organization of audio files on Microsoft Windows, built using the BASS audio library.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AIMP</span> Audio player software developed by AIMP

AIMP is a freeware audio player for Windows and Android, originally developed by Russian developer Artem Izmaylov.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">TagLib</span>

TagLib is a free library for reading and editing metadata embedded into audio files.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Puddletag</span>

Puddletag is a graphical audio file metadata editor ("tagger") for Unix-like operating systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kid3</span> Tag editor

Kid3 is an open-source cross-platform audio tag editor for many audio file formats. It supports DSF, MP3, Ogg, FLAC, MPC, MPEG-4 (mp4/m4a/m4b), AAC, Opus, SPX, TrueAudio, APE, WavPack, WMA, WAV, AIFF, tracker modules.

References

  1. ↑ "Quick Start - MusicBrainz Picard". picard.musicbrainz.org. Retrieved 2018-09-14.
  2. ↑ "ISO/IEC 21000", Encyclopedia of Multimedia, Springer US, 2008, p. 376, doi:10.1007/978-0-387-78414-4_549, ISBN   9780387747248
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