MusicBrainz is a MetaBrainz project that aims to create a collaborative music database that is similar to the freedb project. MusicBrainz was founded in response to the restrictions placed on the Compact Disc Database (CDDB), a database for software applications to look up audio CD information on the Internet. MusicBrainz has expanded its goals to reach beyond a CD metadata storehouse to become a structured online database for music.
Vorbis is a free and open-source software project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The project produces an audio coding format and software reference encoder/decoder (codec) for lossy audio compression, libvorbis. Vorbis is most commonly used in conjunction with the Ogg container format and it is therefore often referred to as Ogg Vorbis.
ID3 is a metadata container most often used in conjunction with the MP3 audio file format. It allows information such as the title, artist, album, track number, and other information about the file to be stored in the file itself.
APE tags comprise one extant convention used to store information (metadata) about a given digital audio file. Each APE tag constitutes a discrete element that describes a single attribute of the file's contents. Each consists of a key/value pair; the key is simply a label that names the attribute, such as Year, Title, Artist, or Track Number, etc.), and associated with it is a corresponding value, namely, some information descriptive of this file, in terms of the attribute in question. APE tags can be used with .ape-formatted recordings, as well as with sound files of other audio file formats.
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.
A Vorbis comment is a metadata container used in the Vorbis, FLAC, Theora, Speex and Opus file formats. It allows information such as the title, artist, album, track number or other information about the file to be added to the file itself. However, as the official Ogg Vorbis documentation notes, “[the comment header] is meant for short, text comments, not arbitrary metadata; arbitrary metadata belongs in a separate logical bitstream that provides greater structure and machine parseability.” Instead, the intended function of Vorbis comments is to approximate the kind of information that might be hand-inked onto a blank faced CD-R or CD-RW: a few lines of notes briefly detailing the content.
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.
GNOME Commander is a 'two panel' graphical file manager for GNOME. It is built using the GTK+ toolkit and GVfs.
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.
Cmus is a small, fast console audio player for Unix-like operating systems. cmus is distributed under the terms of the GPL-2.0-or-later and is operated exclusively through a text-based user interface, built with ncurses.
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 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.
Nightingale is a discontinued free, open source audio player based on the Songbird media player source code. As such, Nightingale's engine is based on the Mozilla XULRunner with libraries such as the GStreamer media framework and libtag providing media tagging and playback support, amongst others.
Quod Libet is a cross-platform free and open-source audio player, tag editor and library organizer. The main design philosophy is that the user knows how they want to organize their music best; the software is therefore built to be fully customizable and extensible using regular expressions and boolean logic. Quod Libet is based on GTK and written in Python, and uses the Mutagen tagging library.
TagLib is a free library for reading and editing metadata embedded into audio files.
qmmp is a free and open-source cross-platform audio player that is similar to Winamp. It is written in C++ using the Qt widget toolkit for the user interface. It officially supports the operating systems Linux, FreeBSD and Microsoft Windows. In most popular Linux distributions, it is available through the standard package repositories. Until Audacious switched to Qt in version 4.0, qmmp was the only audio player to use Qt and not feature a database.
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.
fre:ac is a free audio converter and CD extractor for Windows, Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD, distributed under the GPL-2.0-or-later.
DeaDBeeF is an audio player software available for Windows, Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. An ad-supported Android version is available, but has not been updated since 2017. DeaDBeeF is free and open-source software, except on Android.
