[COLUG] Music metadata tagging and renaming

[Chris Clonch]

Hi all.

I have been looking for a good tagging application for my rather large music 
collection and have not had much luck finding one.  I am hoping someone here 
can suggest an app that meets my requirements.  My preference is for a KDE/qt 
based app but I will use anything if nothing KDE fits what I'm looking for.

What am I looking for in a tagging app, glad you asked:

* A GUI app.  While I'm completely at home in a shell, I don't think I am as 
productive when it comes to tagging from a shell.

* Something similar to Tag&Rename (http://www.softpointer.com/tr.htm).  This 
is the application I've used in Windows and continue to switch back .  This 
is also one of the few programs I purchased because I couldn't find anything 
that compared.  Its a tagging app first and foremost.

* At least a two pane approach with a directory tree on one and the files in 
the other.  Even better would be a three pane, as in T&R, with tabbed tagging 
tools on top.

* "Auto" tag feature that retrieves album information from the Internet. This 
includes cover art as well.  However I like control over the process, so it 
should take the form of suggestions, allowing me to changes if need be.  It 
would also be cool if it supported exotic tags like BPM, or could scour 
several online sources and combine them into one homogeneous suggestion.

* Mass tag modification feature.  This one is pretty obvious but I think it 
comes down to how it is implemented.  I like the checkboxes used in T&R; tick 
the ones you want to change and and untick the ones to leave alone.

* Mass rename based of of tags, supporting both directory and  filename 
renaming.

* Wide range of file/tag formats.  At the very least, vorbis, mp3, and flac.

Things I don't care about: a built in player.  I use amarok, end of story.

Now I have tried a great many tagging applications including cowbell, picard 
(qt), kid3, and amarok.  All of them had too many short comings, and didn't 
meet all of my features.  I haven't looked at prokyon3 due to its MySQL 
requirement (no need for a db backend, thats what the tags are for...).  And 
while I realize many might think I'm being a little picky (am I?), I like 
what I like.  I am even entertaining the notion of creating my own if I can't 
find anthing that fits the bill, but between family, work, and needed to 
learn programming in qt, we are talking about a major undertaking and little 
time to commit.

Ohh, and before I forget I'm running gentoo so would perfer ebuilds (in 
portage or 3rd party/overlays) but will compile myself, again, if need be.

So after all this babble, does anyone have any suggestions, comments, remarks?

Thanks,
-Chris