Bear with me: I have to give some background before the actual question.


Due to illness, or rather a chronic condition, my eyesight, my energy and my memory are impaired. I don't write this to get sympathy, just to explain that my capacity is somewhat limited.

I listen to music a lot. In fact, I use sound files therapeutically, to soothe my nerves and to enhance my resting. Hence I've a fairly large collection of music files. As players I use a couple of Squeezeboxes. The software runs in a network disc (in fact under a tiny kind of linux), where also the music files reside. The number of files is probably a bit above 100.000, but some of them are duplicates.

The mp3-files are tagged, and in addition to the ordinary set of tags for title, genre, etc, the music server uses tags such as "LANGUAGE" and "USAGE" - of great importance for me. Such tags, in addition to genre tags, are my chief way to get suitable sound ambience.

Often I discover that one or another file would need adjustment of the tags, but at the moment I've not yet installed any linux software that handle mp3-files.

My music taste is rather eclectic, but I suspect that much of what I have in my collection is too unusual to be found in the databases for "finger prints". I put an honor in using correctly spelled titles and names on Castillian, French, Germanic and Finnish languages. I use Cyrillic script in tags when appropriate. And many file names use different kinds of charactersets extended beyond ASCII.

The computers I intend to install the mp3 taggers on use Mint (one 64b with SSD disc, one 32b with ordinary hard drive)

Question:

Given my needs, in particular the need to handle custom tags, "European" file names, and a large collection of files on a network disc, are there any mp3-taggers that I better avoid?

Thanks in advance!
:-)

I don't know about what to avoid, but my first suggestion to use would be easytag.

I used EasyTag myself -- it is a little counter-intuitive, to my mind, in places but it's powerful and as far as I know allows accented characters and the like (it certainly allowed me to add Änglagård as an artist) and even allows embedding images if that's what you want to do.
However, EasyTag does not allow the creating or editing or custom tags and as far as a quick google goes they have no plans to.
So, I just found out about Ex Falso (package should be called exfalso in Mint) which seems a lot more powerful than EasyTag and, perhaps, a little more intuitive. I haven't played with it yet though so can't say more than it looks like it ought to be good.

I've always liked Puddletag.