I sitting here staring at the Mint(ubuntu) package manager wondering which
ID3 tag tool to use. It seems there are four command line tools:
-----> id3, id3ren, id3tool and id3v2

I'm wondering if anyone has experience with any of these tool and
can suggest the pros/cons or just recommend one.

Might not be the right Open Source answer but personally I think mp3tag.de (run in Wine) is the most superior ID3Tag solution. That program is amazing. It offers rename templates, tag substitution, and all that great stuff.

No CLI options of course, but if you want to manage huge music collection tagsets, you can't get much better.

I use "easytag" which is open source and works extremely well with lots of features.

MP3tag is a great program, I used it a lot with windows. But it doesnt really do anything that easytag wont do as well.

You know, it kind of bugs me when people ask what the best <something> is. How are we supposed to answer? Unless we know what your personal idea of "best" is, unless you give us some concrete, objective parameters on which we should base the recommendations, the only thing we can do is give our personal opinions (which are not necessarily unbiased, or based on comprehensive knowledge).

So I recommend that you simply try them all out (and others, there are quite a few more available) and see how they perform. You can also get on google and see what other people have to say about each one. Then use the one that you like the most. Or at very least tell us what you're actually looking for in such a program.


BTW, I personally recommend either easytag or kid3 (my subjective opinion).

BTW2, I hope you realize that all four of the programs you listed are cli-only, and I believe id3 and id3tool only support version 1 tags.

EasyTag must have come a long way then because several years ago when I really needed a Linux ID3Tag solution there were a lot of things EasyTag couldn't do that I do in Mp3Tag.de a lot (for example, couldn't replace strings within tags or file names based on regular expressions)

Anyways... we all know what they say about opinions --we all got one!

Thanks to all for you thoughts.

As for "David the H.Senior Member" ....
"There's a whole lot of people suffering tonight from the disease of conceit" ... BD

I thought that easytag did that now. I could well be wrong, I dont really use regular expressions much. If I am wrong, opps.