Best Music Tag Editors for Linux

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For music collectors, tagging their collected files is tedious work. Basically you would have to fill out all kinds of tags and fields such as artist name, song title, album name, and genre. Without this information, your music collection would not be organized and it would be hard to find a single track from it.

Thanks to music tag editor softwares, we can now automatically fill out the tags of music files. They can also be used to fix incorrect or missing tags, and add missing artwork from online sources as well.

This article will cover a list of the best music tag editor available for Linux.

Contents hide
1 EasyTAG
2 Puddletag
3 Kid3
4 MusicBrainz Picard
5 Ex Falso

EasyTAG

EasyTAG is a free and open source audio tagging utility that can create and manage tags for a number of different audio formats. With EasyTAG, you can quickly and easily tag your audio files for easy management and organization. It supports a wide range of file formats, including MP3, MP2, MP4/AAC, FLAC, Ogg Opus, Ogg Speex, Ogg Vorbis, MusePack, Monkey’s Audio and WavPack files.

EasyTAG also includes automatic tagging of all audio files in a directory, matching patterns from a text file, recursive editing, auto-completion, undo and redo support, upper and lower-case conversion, support for retrieving data from online tagging services, a tree view file browser, playlist creator, and other features.

It is a very light, simple program that works flawlessly on all main operating systems such as Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS. It has undergone continuous development and has matured into a reliable application.

EasyTag Features

  • Organize your music library with ease using powerful tools for playlist creation, bulk renaming, directory renaming, and directory restructuring.
  • The toolbar includes features such as search, creating a playlist, CDDB lookup, quitting, and stopping, as well as the options mentioned above.
  • It has a wide number of Tag fields, allowing you to filter and modify media objects based on a variety of factors.
  • Presets and Custom Masks can be used to automate tagging.
  • Capability to read and display tag header information.
  • Tree-based file browser for navigating your media libraries.
  • Robust playlist creator with undo/redo capability.
  • Supports recursion throughout subdirectories.

In order to install EasyTAG in Ubuntu, use the following command

sudo apt install easytag

You can install EasyTAG from the package manager in other Linux distributions. A universal flatpak build is also available here.

Puddletag

Puddletag is a free and open source audio tag editor that displays tags in a spreadsheet-like tabular interface. You can sort audio files by tags and edit tags for multiple files without having to leave the window, as the tabular interface shows tags for multiple files at once. Puddletag also has some great features like pattern-based tag editing, converting between lower and upper case, fetching tags from online services, supporting multiple audio file formats including MP3s, a preview mode, filename conversion, extended tag support, and more!

Supported formats: ID3v1, ID3v2 (mp3), MP4 (mp4, m4a, etc.), VorbisComments (ogg, flac), Musepack (mpc), Monkey’s Audio (.ape) and WavPack (wv).

Puddletag Features

  • Batch Tag Editing
  • Full Unicode support.
  • Support for embedded album cover art.
  • Automatically creates playlists.
  • Recursive subfolder support.
  • User-defined field mappings.
  • Remove parts of a tag or the entire tag from multiple files.
  • Rename and/or move files and folders based on the tag information.

In order to install Puddletag in Ubuntu, use the command below:

sudo apt install puddletag

Kid3

Kid3 is a free and open source audio file tag editor developed by the KDE team. It can alter tags in a variety of audio file formats, including mp3, ogg, FLAC, mp4, and wav. It can modify tags for several files at once and convert tags between different tagging formats as well. Other key features of Kid3 include automated tagging through its scripting interface, support for importing tags from web databases, exporting tags, the ability to see and change lyrics, uppercase and lowercase conversion, filename generator, playlist builder, etc.

Kid3 is developed in his spare time by Urs Fleisch, the first version was released back in 2003 as a KDE application for MP3 files (hence the name starting with a K and ending with ID3). As of this writing, Kid3 has grown for more than 12 years, it has evolved a lot to be reliable and now runs on all major desktop operating systems.

  • Edit ID3v1.1 tags and all ID3v2.3 and ID3v2.4 frames
  • Convert between ID3v1.1, ID3v2.3 and ID3v2.4 tags
  • Edit tags in MP3, Ogg/Vorbis, FLAC, MPC, MP4/AAC, MP2, Opus, Speex, TrueAudio, WavPack, WMA, WAV, AIFF files and tracker modules (MOD, S3M, IT, XM)
  • Batch editing on multiple files at the same time is super convenient and a huge time saver!
  • Generate tags from filenames, from the contents of tag fields or generate filenames from tags
  • Rename and create directories from tags
  • Automatically convert upper and lower case and replace strings
  • Import data from online services such as gnudb.org, TrackType.org, MusicBrainz, Discogs, Amazon, etc
  • Export tags as CSV, HTML, playlists, Kover XML and in other formats
  • Edit synchronized lyrics and event timing codes, import and export LRC files

To install Kid3 in Ubuntu, use the command specified below:

sudo apt install kid3

In other Linux distributions, you can install Kid3 from the package manager. A universal flatpak build is also available.

MusicBrainz Picard

Picard is a Python-based audio file metadata editor that is free, open source, and cross-platform. It concentrates on album-based tagging rather than the track-based tag editing pattern prevalent in other audio taggers. MusicBrainz Picard supports a wide range of audio file types, including mp3, WAV, and OGG. Other key features of MusicBrainz Picard include crowd-sourced audio fingerprint database identification, plugins, automated tagging of audio files using MusicBrainz database, ability to embed and download cover art images, custom naming templates and scripts, and so on.

To install MusicBrainz Picard in Ubuntu, use the command specified below:

sudo apt install picard

You can install MusicBrainz Picard in other Linux distributions from the package manager. Other download options includes flatpak and snap packages.

Ex Falso

Ex Falso is a free and open source audio metadata editor that works with a variety of audio file formats such as mp3, FLAC, and ogg vorbis. It is included with the Quod Libet music player package. You may, however, install it as a standalone software without first installing the music player. Ex Falso additionally includes support for editing ID3v2 tags, editing and renaming using patterns, multiple values for various fields, Python-based plugins, support for editing tags of several files at once, the option to rollback custom modifications, and other capabilities.

In order to install Ex Falso in Ubuntu, use the following command:

sudo apt install exfalso

You can install Ex Falso in other Linux distributions from the package manager. You can also compile it from source code, but it would require much more command-line skill.

We hope that the information above help you find the suitable tagging software to install on your Linux machine.

You may be interested in our Linux software roundups, including 8 Best Open Source CMDB software, Best Linux Video Converters, Best Linux Home Security Software, or best SNES emulator for Linux.

If you have any suggestion, please feel free to leave a comment below.

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