Manage Your Music Efficiently in Linux

Today PC's have become a major source of entertainment ... Whether its listening Music, watching Movies , playing Games or chatting in past time.. PC has does it all to keep you entertained for a long period of time.. PC has now turned to a jukebox now apart from what they are mainly meant for !

Today people generally store their Music in their PC .. Keeping Music in PC has lots of advantages like you have a Soft copy always accessible from anywhere, can easily backup/delete music collection, saves space by not utilizing DVD's/Cd's considering Online Music Shops. Easy management and Quicker Search..

Keeping Music in Cd's and similar stuff is hard.. As you just can't carry every Media's with you and compiling you favorite song collection to Cd's and DVD's will consume too much recourse.. With the arrival of Portable Media player like iPod, Walkman, Zen and others carrying music was so easy..

But to keep your Music collection updated and proper you must keep them in proper way.. A properly tagged and named music file will be easy to find else you will just waste your time searching the Gb's of your Disk..

So why waste time ? Just go through the guide and you will know how to easily and efficiently manage your Music Collection in GNU/Linux OS..

The benefits of properly tagged Music Collection are : -

1. Easy and Fast Search
2. Ability to use advance Music features like Album Art, Cover Switcher etc.
3. Identification of Album and Artist ..

Before we get started we will require the following software pre-installed in your GNU/Linux

• Easy Tag :EasyTAG - Tag editor for MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MusePack and Monkey's Audio files, ...
• Picard :PicardTagger - MusicBrainz
• Music Player
  • Gnome : Banshee 1.2
  • KDE : Amarok 2. or 1.4.9

Installation : Installation of these packages is easy.. Just open The Package Manager of you Linux OS like Synaptic in Debian Based distro , URPMI in Mandriva, Yast in open SUSE etc.. and type the name of the Software listed.. Select the Package and Install it ...

Note : Ubuntu 8.04 or lower users won't get Banshee 1.2 In the default repository so please add the Banshee PPA and install the banshee-1 package from Synaptic Package Manager



The next step is to Manage you Music .. We will edit the Music Tags in such a way that it help us quicker search and allow us to use new PMP features ..

1'st copy the Collection to Hard Drive .. If you rip the CD/DVD make sure you rename the file from something like Track 1 to the Title of The Song..To differentiate between Albums create New folders and rename them to Album/Movie Name and paste the relevant track under it. Renaming help us easy identification of a particular track..


After you have renamed the Track we will focus on renaming/editing the Tags.. Though most of the Linux Media Player comes with Tag Editor but the features they provide is just not good enough for decent edit.

Therefor we will use a standalone Tag Editor.. Easy Tag, this tag editor provides viewing and editing tags of various Audio Format.. Currently supported Formats are mp2, mp3, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, Mp4/AAC, Mousepack and monkey audio file ..

Easy Tag provide easy options for Editing Tag .. On the left side there is a Browsing Tree which will help you to navigate to your Music Partition/Folder.. Once you are done with Folder, select the files and enter the tag and save it..



Remembering Tags for every music is just not possible .. It creates a confusion for user that what to enter ? To help you with this problem there is a Website called Music Brainz .. Welcome to MusicBrainz! - MusicBrainz

Music Brainz contains Music and Tags of Audio files .. The website has a huge collection ranging from International to National tracks too ..There are two ways get the information either surf the website and get the relevant information or there is a simple way..

Music Brainz Tag feature gets even handy with a nifty tool known as Picard.. Picard not only allows user to search Tags from Music Brainz but also allow easy option for editing Tags..


Now since you have edited the Tracks Name and Tags its already done Now only few things to remember. I have seen people cry for not getting Right Album Art.. To get the exact Album Art of your Music Album either depend on Music Player.. Most of the Advance player support fetching of Album Art from respective sites.. Or just search Good from <Album Name> Album Art and under the image tag search for the suitable Image..
Save the Image to the Album folder with name Album Art.. After you play music with Banshee 1.2 or Amarok the player with set the Album art automatically from the folder ..

If you use Media Player like ipod or similar .. you can easily save Album Art to it.. Amarok automatically saves Album Art to ipod as soon as you transfer your Tagged Music to it .. While in Gnome you have to use GTK-POD gtkpod - a GUI for Apple's iPod using GTK2 for transferring Music and Album Art ..


Thats it! Now you have a well arranged Music Collection that not only look good but also comes handy in searching files

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Keep the Comments and Suggestions Coming
Regards Darky

Great work buddy..It wud be good to see if companies like creative open source drivers for latest sound cards with all functions.

Is there any reason to not have all those apps merged into just the one ? amarok = itself + picard + easy tag

i'm aware you use best of breed but still everything under one roof has its appeal...simplicity

^^Please read the guide ! I have mentioned there that Media player do provide options for Editing Tags but not enough to clear all the unwanted Tags

well they should improve it, tagging is essential to any media manager.