Feature Request - Tag compare and transcoding

General Discussion
1

First off what a fantastic app MP3TAG is. I have been aware of it for some time, but only recently have I fully appreciated the depth of functionality it provides. The power of Actions with scripting is incredible, and it has made cleaning up my music collection a breeze, so thank you.

That said, there is one thing that would make this tool so much more helpful. I realise this is "on the edge" of what MP3TAG is, but I could see this as a relatively simple intergration with third party apps.

So the issue that I'm trying to address is that in addition to my main library which is 95% flac and 5% MP3. I keep a second copy of the library that is 100% MP3. This is for portability and compatability issues (My car won't play flac, and even if it did the don't make memory cards large enough (although getting close).

So managing this second Library, does become problematic, keeping all the tags / filenames in sync given a large music collection. There are two options I would love to see added.

  1. The ability to transcode from flac to MP3, and write the existing tags into new format. Clearly there are lots of tools that can do this, but the ability to search and filter in MP3TAG would give such a fine level of control over which files are transcoded. I would have thought this might not be too hard to do as you can use FLAC, and LAME software to do the transcoding. (Or other tools for people that want to transdode from format a to b. I realise this is a little beyond the purpose of MP3Tag, but it is such a logical extension to the search/filter capabilites.

  2. The ability to compare tags between two files (regardless of format) and write changes to one or the other. In addition to keeping both a flac and MP3 library, I also keep on-line and off-line backups of the master library. Any changes I make to tag data, thus has to be synced to other places. Again there are tools to do this, (syncthing) but I prefer to manually review propsed changes rather than them happening automatically. I have had a several instanaces where unwanted changes/errors have been replicated before I realised what was happening. I strongly prefer the option to look for differences, and then apply the changes that I'm happy with, hence this feature request.

I am aware I could use beets, a mucis library manager as this is the territory these requests start to move into, but it is command line, not intuative, and it feels like you need to be python programmer to make it work. MP3tag does so much already, and is so easy to use, these addons would really make it possible to manage a library.

Anyway, if you read all that thanks for listening to my ramblings and while I would love to see these capabilites I understand they may take MP3TAG beyond where you want to go.

2

I think that there are already dedicated and matured programs around that synchronize any amount of files - and that at the click on a button.
I doubt that visual comparing the tags in large libraries is a feasible way.

To get the tag data from the source files to the target files, use Edit>Copy tag and Edit>Paste tag.
If the source files and target files are the same in number and order, you can copy all the tag data from all the source files to all the target files in one go, no need to do it file by file.

If you want to encode files (again) I also think that there are a lot of ready-made tools out there that already have numerous functions to cater for almost all the requirements.
Here is a thread about the use of ffmpeg as a tool to be called from MP3tag.

3

Mp3tag itself never alters the audio portion of files. That has been a long-standing principle here and I would be surprised if the developer ever decides to relax it. Mp3tag is a tag editor, not a file converter. But the Tool option that @Ohrenkino mentioned does enable conversions by running command-line applications. It works very well.

Mp3tag cannot itself make comparisons of any kind between selected files. That would require a major overhaul of the application.

4

Thanks both @ohrenkino and @Doug_Mackie for the quick response. I will look into using the user defined tools, that's actually what I was kind of thinking of anyway for the transcoding so its nice to find out it's already there. While the suggestion to copy tags might have some benefit, the comparison of tags is really what I'm after. I have tried several tools for this, but I have yet to find one that hits the sweep spot. I guess I need to spend more time trying to figure beets out. Alternative suggestions on tag comparisson tools appreciated.