Sound
Metadata tagging
When I rip my own CDs I rip them to FLAC, and would like to use ogg for smaller file sizes but there are not enough devices which support it, so I end up encoding to MP3 just so I can play on the car stereo, cell phone, or portable MP3 player. AAC is also not bad but has more IP encumbrances. FLAC at least is future-proof, if not small, because the encoding is lossless so I can always re-encode to other formats in the future.
Some day if Hans Reiser has his way, the filesystem will store the metadata, like it was on MacOS prior to OS X; and this will be done in a standard way, rather than differently for every kind of file. (And tar will have to be extended to make portable tarballs with metadata in them.) Meanwhile, every music file format has its own metadata format. So you need complex tools to deal with the present-day mess.
- EasyTag is by far the best for Linux. Most taggers don't even try to deal with more than one format but EasyTag does MP3, MP2, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, MusePack and Monkey's Audio so far. Even can do album art, and handles multiple album art images of different types (front cover, back cover, inside, etc.). Manages ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags transparently, at the same time, without bothering you about which is which. Auto-converts from ID3V1 to ID3V2 on files that don't yet have the V2 tags, without bothering you about it. Can extract metadata patterns from filenames for files that have no metadata at all. Can rename files to whatever pattern you like. How did I ever live without this?
- MP3 Tag Tools is about as good as it gets for free if you are stuck on Windows. At least you can write album art images, and use the right category for them (not just "other" like stupid iTunes) but the interface is relatively clumsy. Only deals with MP3 files.
- album art downloader is kindof unique so far - it tries to automatically grab album art off the net. It doesn't work too well behind a proxy firewall though.
Conversion
- [ogg2mp3] does a good job despite being heretical. I use it only when the only file I have is an OGG, and I need a form that plays on portable devices. Don't see any point in just downloading MP3s if OGGs are available, because MP3s are quite obsolete. Don't see a point in converting other lossy codecs into ogg either, because I want my oggs to be pristine, without the extra artifacts.
Ripping
- ABCDE does a fine job of command-line ripping, and can be configured to encode multiple formats at the same time. I use FLAC and MP3 (knowing I can make OGGs later if there is ever a device which can play oggs but not flac). It does a fine job of tagging too, using freedb.org, and if there are multiple choices, it lets you choose. My nits are that I cannot change the genre until later (it's often wrong in freedb - people choose ambiguous categories like rock or blues or newage for almost everything), and that it doesn't try to do anything with album art. I emailed the author and he is refusing to even think about including such a feature. So if I scan album art, I just save it as cover.jpg in the same directory and maybe will deal with it later if I get around to it.