tag-edit-mode

An Emacs major mode to edit file tags (id3, vorbis, etc). Quickly and easily edit tags with the power of Emacs!

WARNING: This is currently beta-quality software; use at your own risk!

NOTE: Currently, tag-edit-mode only supports one set of tags per file. So if a file has both id3v1 and id3v2, only id3v2 is read. If a file only has id3v1, id3v1 is read, but id3v2 is written.

Features

Is a standard Emacs major mode, so keyboard macros, search/replace, etc work as expected.
Supports multiple “backends”: kid3, ffmpeg, and possibly others in the future.
Not limited to just audio files; supports other file tag types when a supported backend is detected. (Though no others are implemented yet…)

Installation

Ensure you have ffmpeg installed and in your $PATH so Emacs can find it, since tag-edit-mode requires it.

After installing tag-edit-mode by putting its directory in your load-path, type M-: (require 'tag-edit-mode) RET to load it.

Usage

After installing tag-edit-mode, you can start editing tags with one of the following commands:

tag-edit - Prompt for a file or directory to edit. If a directory is selected, its contents are opened for editing.
dired-tag-edit - Edit the files marked in the current dired buffer, or the file under point if nothing is marked.

Bindings

Once you’ve opened files for editing, you will see the current tags for each file, as well as a standard list of tags that are always displayed for files (tag-edit-standard-tags). Tag-edit-mode buffers support the following built-in bindings:

C-c C-c - Write the tags for the file under point.
C-x C-s - Write the tags for all changed files in the current buffer.
C-c C-k - Revert the tags for the file under point back to what is currently saved in the file.
C-c C-M-k - Revert the tags for all files in the buffer.
TAB - Collapse (or re-expand) the file under point.
M-p - Jump to the previous field.
M-n - Jump to the next field.
C-c C-p - Jump to the previous file in the buffer.
C-c C-n - Jump to the next file in the buffer.

C-c C-t - Preview the file under point. Press again to stop the preview.
C-c C-o - Edit the file under point in an external editor.

Shell Functions

To easily call tag-edit-mode from your shell, you can define a function like so:

Bash

tag-edit() {
    emacsclient --eval "(tag-edit-directory \"$(readlink -f "$1")\")"
}

Fish

function tag-edit -d "Edit the media tags of the specified file in tag-edit-mode in Emacs."
    emacsclient --eval "(tag-edit-directory \"$(path resolve $argv[1])\")"
end

Similar Software

beets

“The music geek’s media organizer”. Beets catalogs your collection, automatically improving its metadata as it goes using MusicBrainz or similar databases. Then it provides a bouquet of tools for manipulating and accessing your music. Because beets is designed as a library, it can do almost anything you can imagine for your music collection.

Beets’ edit plugin adds the ability to edit tags of media files using a text editor of your choice. Unlike tag-edit-mode, though, the plugin’s interface is a lot more sparse (doesn’t show all tags), less featureful, and does not have bindings in Emacs.

kid3

Media tag editor from the KDE project. If you want to easily tag multiple MP3, Ogg/Vorbis, FLAC, Monkey’s Audio, MPC, MP4/AAC, MP2, Opus, Speex, TrueAudio, WavPack, WMA/WMV, WAV and AIFF files (e.g. full albums) without typing the same information again and again and have control over both ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags, then Kid3 is the program you are looking for.

Kid3 even has its own command line interface, but it is not specialized for Emacs.

defaultxr / tag-edit-mode