Using Perl to organize my MP3's

[spurperl]

Dear fellow monks,

Just wanted to share an experience of how Perl made life easier (again !).
I like to organize my MP3's by giving them file names of the form "Author - Song".mp3... for some reason I despise MP3's ID3 tags.
Since a newer version of Winamp came in, it made up ID3v2 for all songs, and in winamp's playlist screen I see "no artist - no title" for all, and that's annoying. Changing thousands of MP3's manually is not fun enough to even start doing it, so I was mad for some time.

Today I finally decided to get it over with !
My MP3's are on the Win2k workstation, no Perl there (it's on the AIXes/Linuxes)... No problem, download Cygwin's Perl 5.8 port. Works great... OK, going to search.cpan.org, MP3::Tag seems suitable... Installing... Hmm, it's pretty complicated... Tinkering with the examples for a few minutes... Viola !
Another 15 minutes, and I had the following script that removes all ID3 tags from a given list of MP3's,

use MP3::Tag;

foreach $filename (@ARGV)
{
    print "$filename\n";

    $mp3 = MP3::Tag->new($filename);

    # read an existing tag
    $mp3->get_tags();
      
    if (exists $mp3->{ID3v2})
    {
        $id3v2 = $mp3->{ID3v2};
        $id3v2->remove_tag();
    }
    
    if (exists $mp3->{ID3v1})
    {
        $id3v1 = $mp3->{ID3v1};
        $id3v1->remove_tag();
    }
}

and in another 5 minutes I have a nice, correct, Winamp playlist.

[Aristotle]

Or a little more compactly,

    exists $mp3->{$_} and $mp3->{$_}->remove_tag()
        for qw(ID3v1 ID3v2);

or even

    $mp3->{$_}->remove_tag()
        for grep exists $mp3->{$_}, qw(ID3v1 ID3v2);

Makeshifts last the longest.

[spurperl]

Nice, thanks...

The duplicated code seemed a bit smelly to me, and yours is a nice solution.

[batkins]

cool. you might also find this node useful.

[shotgunefx]

I did something similar but instead of removing tags, I generated them from the directory structure and filename. I used MP3::ID3v1Tag which worked well.

-Lee

"To be civilized is to deny one's nature."

[Anonymous Monk]

Not to devalue any of your work, but I think I should point out that Winamp can easily be configured to ignore the tags, which is IMHO preferable to stripping them. In Winamp's Preferences -> Input -> MPEG Decoder -> Title tab, there's a plainly marked checkbox for using the tags. This is as of Winamp 2.80, 3.x may be slightly different.

[tstock]

In the future, when you rip your CD's for legal copies, just don't make ID3 tags ?

Tiago