Less time is spent these days in sorting things thanks to the power of computing. In particular, the amount of music owned by one average person today would probably amount to the music collection of their entire neighborhood as compared to the 80’s cassette era. So serious sorting capabilities has been extended to the average Joe for the simple reason that media (movies, music, pictures, etc) is increasingly popular in digital format.

Over the last few years, I’ve accumulated a few gigs of music and have found that it was so difficult to sort everything out properly for my iPod. It’s more than just the artist and title – it’s the year, genre, track number, length… the list goes on. When I’m in the train looking for that one song I’d like to listen to, the last thing I want to do is develop a callous on my thumb from rotating the iPod control until I get there.

So, out on my quest to find an mp3 tagger called EasyTag (for Ubuntu). Although it is powerful tool, I found it difficult to navigate and understand how to use. At the end of the day, I combined the power of EasyTag with GPRename to create an automated tagging system. I used EasyTag to assign genre, artist and title to the mp3; unfortunately this application did not have an easy way to remove the first few characters of a track or use regular expressions to filter them out – so I used GPRename for that. An incredibly quick tool to rename files, one of its functions is to remove the first few characters of any collection of files in a selected directory. It is worth mentioning that directory navigation isn’t the best for GPRename because there is a very small arrow to click when expanding directories… but I got used to it.

With a little elbow grease I was able to rename my entire collection in about 20 minutes. I think this reduces my searching time considerably not to mention avoidance of carpel tunnel! Have you been using a tool to do the same thing? If so, have you come across one for Ubuntu? Let me know if you’ve been able to find one that covers the same functionalities I’ve been able to find across both EasyTag and GPRename. Needless to say, I’d rather use one application than two for essentially the same goal.

Happy sorting!

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