Arch Linux

brucebertrand

Member

Registered: 2006-07-24

Posts: 52

Media player that supports arbitrary tag fields

I'm looking for a media player, along the lines of Rhythmbox or Amarok, that supports sorting/grouping/editing of arbitrary metatag fields. 

I'm finding the standard Artist/Album/Title setup a bit limiting for my library.  For my purposes (academic - critical listening and comparison of classical music), I need to have tags for the composer, piece, movement, conductor, performer('s), publisher, album name, publication date, and recording date. 

Vorbis comments work well for this, as they allow arbitrary field names.  But, to my knowledge, none of the music players make use of this degree of freedom.

Any suggestions?

smoon

Member

Registered: 2005-08-22

Posts: 468

Website

Re: Media player that supports arbitrary tag fields

Sounds like a job for XMMS2 Collections: http://wiki.xmms2.xmms.se/index.php/Collections. I don't think there's anything sorting/grouping related it can't do. Unfortunately I don't think it does tag-editing yet.

brucebertrand

Member

Registered: 2006-07-24

Posts: 52

Re: Media player that supports arbitrary tag fields

I'll check it out.

BTW...every time I see your avatar I want to swat at my screen....it really freaks me out!

Last edited by brucebertrand (2007-08-15 01:37:27)

MrWeatherbee

Member

Registered: 2007-08-01

Posts: 287

Re: Media player that supports arbitrary tag fields

Quod Libet & its companion Ex Falso tagger should work (in the repos). I successfully added the arbitrary tag "sub-genre" using the preferences dialog; both the Quod Libet player and library handled those tags just fine.

http://www.sacredchao.net/quodlibet

The "sub-genre" tag was originally added to files (FLAC, Ogg, MPC, MP3) with MP3Tag and played / displayed in Foobar2000 on Windows ... both of these apps are really the holy grail of flexibility that you are looking for, but Linux has nothing closely approximating them, especially Foobar2000 (I think there is a wine tutorial for Foobar2000 on HydrogenAudio forums, but if you've not had experience with Foobar under Windows, I'm not sure I'd want to start out with it on Linux/Wine.

Anyway, the underlying mutagen metadata handler used by Quod Libet and Ex Falso is what allows their flexibility in handling tags, and it is available in other players as well, including Listen and Exaile. Unfortunately, from what I can tell, neither Listen or Exaile implemented much of the power of mutagen (at least I couldn't see that arbitrary tags could be added / displayed), plus Exaile is buggy as h*ll in my experience. The biggest problem I have with all these players that I have mentioned (including Quod Libet) is that they are python apps, and I have a thing about (against) python apps. They are really resource hungry, and even though I have plenty of power to spare, I just dislike the concept of having to run an app to run an app, so to speak (as is the way python and java, which I also dislike, work). But, sometimes you have to suck it up.

So, give Quod Libet a try if you've gotten anything positive out of what I've said (beyond my python bias, Quod Libet is good and pretty popular). I'm not currently using Quod (I'm using MPD + gMPC, and it doesn't handle arbitrary tags either), but I may give Quod another chance at some point just for the tag handling.

Someone else may know of another solution, and if so, we'll both learn something useful.