Re: tag editing

[Grant Shoshin Shangreaux]

Petteri Hintsanen writes:

> I wouldn’t recommend going this way, at least not yet.

your insight is very much appreciated. i think all the points you
brought up are really important to consider.

> 1. There are already plenty of solid free implementations for writing
>    metadata

agreed, though I've not found a single executable that handles all the
formats and metadata at once. i think TagLib has the capability, and
audiotools tracktag is pretty close. oddly, tracktag does not write a
"genre" tag, which is one of the standard emms-info items.

> 2. Writing to a file always carries the risk of messing up that file.

yes, would be very sad to have EMMS destroy audio files. especially the
ones i'm working with which are originals. i often have backups, but
this is very important. i certainly don't want to be responsible for the
code that is doing it.

> 4. I’m looking forward to add MP3 (id3v2) support for emms-info-native
>    but not more.  Support for MP4, for instance, is pretty complex to
>    do.  With external tools we get much wider coverage for popular
>    formats.  I personally don’t care for nonfree formats, but others
>    may.

Another reason I started working with tracktag. I only cared about
adding metadata to opus, ogg, and flac, but having one interface that
can handle the other formats is a win for wider use.

> For any serious metadata operations I would go with external tools.
> In my own setups I use emms-print-metadata and MPD, and MusicBrainz 
> Picard for tagging.

i agree. i had a sense that empowering emacs to do it would avoid some
of the hassle of setting up the external tools, but its really not that
hard. I built emms-print-metadata not realizing that it didn't support
tagging. i tried for a bit to work on the Taglib shim, but my lack of
time to hack and experience with C was blocking me.

>> 1. add a shim for TagLib to write to files (beyond me at the moment)
>
> this one is probably easy to do.  The current Taglib shim
> (emms-print-metadata) can be extended to support tag updates as well.
> I can help with that if needed.

That would be fantastic. I can continue with tracktag as well, it might
be useful since it is installable with a package manager for users who
might not go the length of compiling the emms-print/write-metadata
helpers. no rush on this, i've solved my immediate problem of writing
tags to opus files, but would be glad to contribute to any wider
solution!

Thanks,
Grant Shangreaux