(Happy Talk Like A Pirate Day.)

Well, I played around with EasyTags for a while, but two things came up that caused me to set it aside (and I may or may not return to using it). First, I realized that SoundJuicer (and for that matter audio-convert) still needed tweaking to properly handle the ID3 tags; I was still back at the general issue of — even though I converted the FLAC files to MP3– having to hand edit all of the tags. Erk.

At this point I played around with Konqueror, which makes a decent CD ripper in its own right, actually. I started it up, typed audiocd:/ in its location bar, and I saw the songs (.wav) on the CD, along with a folder for each of the formats it knows about. I dragged the format I wanted to the directory I wanted on my hdd (using another instance of Konqueror, of course) and it converted them as it copied them over from the CD. Everything wound up with lovely tags. The only drawback is that it seemed a little slow. Default bitrate is 128, but that can be changed in the Kontrol panel (since I run gnome, I used kcontrol from the command line; I’ve installed the complete kde libraries). On the menu, choose the Sound & Media -> Audio CD to find the MP3 Encoder tab which has options to change the bitrate as desired.

At this point, I tested the iPod by loading up (via gtkpod) the newly refurbished MP3 files and all looks well at this point. So now that I know this is the direction to go, I need to get all my music files properly prepped. I have more to say about gtkpod — quite a lot more — but I want to keep this relatively coherent.

But back to SoundJuicer. According to the documentation here, and here (which I noted in the last post, but did not read thoroughly ), Sound Juicer needs a slightly different gstreamer setting to handle MP3 properly. In the process, I also used the modification that creates a better bitrate. This seems to be working well, so I am in the tedious process of properly re-ripping the CDs. I am using audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lame name=enc preset=1001 ! id3v2mux and it’s working nicely.

The question now is that of tagging. I need the files to be properly tagged via ID3. This is what iPod uses to categorize everything, plus the cover art, lyrics etc. I already tried EasyTag, but I’ve put that aside for now, because it also has a distressing tendency to save things left and right even on files I have not worked on, and I don’t know what is going on with that. (”Don’t make me nervous…you wouldn’t like me when I’m nervous…”)

I poked around on musicbrainz and found PicardTagger which actually is overall one of the better tagging programs I found. The documentation is decent and I was able to noodle around and fix tags pretty easily. The biggest shortfall I see here is an inability to somehow add lyrics.

According to the ID3 documentation, lyrics may be added under the USLT field which is then stored as part of the overall tag with the file. This is what iPod uses in order to show lyrics (keep clicking center when playing a song, and the lyrics will show up, if they have been synchronized over with the music). However, understandably so, there are massive copyright issues with lyrics and so most tagging programs I checked out do not supply lyrics. However, it should be okay for me as an individual to copy texts onto my iPod for personal use, which is all I want. But it’s hard to find stuff for that.

This actually led me back to Amarok. There are several add-on scripts such as Lyric Manager which are designed to do what I’d like. (Yes, that’s me in the recent comments; check the older ones and there’s one cryptic comment about saving to the notes directory on an iPod, so I am pursuing this avenue at the moment.) I will report on this after I have wrestled with it for a while.

Back to the gtkpod. Overall, this utility seems to work well with the iPod. Its main shortcoming is an utter lack of documentation. And unfortunately the interface is not intuitive. I’m trying to talk with some of the folks over there about improving the documentation. Their mailing list is very responsive, so this may be improved in the future. But as an example of one issue: it took me some time and fiddling to understand that the way to get a copy of the iTunesDB onto my computer so that adding new songs did not obliterate the ones already there, I had to click on File->Read iTunesDB. The “Synchronize iTunesDB” was not the corrrect choice, nor were any other “synchronize” choices and it’s crucial to understand that within gtkpod, “export” is TO THE COMPUTER, “import” is TO THE IPOD, which is exactly reversed from how I would think of it. There isn’t anything helpful in the documentation, at most it cautions the reader to be sure that the iTunesDB is in sync with the local one or songs may be lost. (More ranting and yelling at the computer at this point.)

In any case, stay tuned for the next post. At the end of all this, I want to post a single nuts and bolts How To for Linux and the iPod. It has to be easier than this, folks!!