Most of us, come across graphics of several kind in our day to day life. Our interaction with graphics ranges from viewing and manipulating images, videos and audio’s. Before we deal with graphics of any kind in real, all the tag information is our source of knowledge.

As a child, when ever I used to see picture and text tags associated with an image, a video or audio and no way to edit it, I feel like finding a way to edit it. Well then I have no idea about EasyTAG.

Here in this article we will be discussing every aspect of EasyTAG, its Features, Usability, Installation and a whole lot other aspects.

What is EasyTAG?

EasyTAG is a free and open source application software released under GNU General Public License for viewing and editing Graphics and ID3 tag. It is a simple application which usages tag manipulation library of MAD project for the support of ID3 tag.

Features of EasyTAG

Very Easy and Straight forward Interface for End user Interaction. The Application is written in ‘C’ Programming Language which usage GTK+ for GUI. Supports a large Number of formats which include (mp2, mp3, mp4, mpc, flac, opus, speex, ape, ogg vorbis). Support for automated Tagging using custom masks. Supports a huge filed of tagging which expands upto (Title, Artist, Album, Disc Album, Year, Track Number, Genre, Composer, Comment, Original Artist, URL, Encoder, Copyright Information and Picture). Support for the change of field value in bulk of files, all at a time. Support for rename of files using tag information as well as external text files. Show file header information i.e., bitrates, time, etc. Auto complete Partial Entered Date. Supports Hierarchical tree based browsing as well as by filed artist and album. Support the recursive action for tagging, renaming, deleting, saving, etc. Undo/redo last change supported. Support for Compact Disc Database (CDDB). CDDB is a database for software applications to find audio CD information over Internet. Capable of Generating Playlist and Inbuilt embedded Searching. Very Mature Project with more than 13 years of serving and still in active stage of development.

Installing EasyTAG in Linux

EasyTAG depends upon GTK+ along with other optional packages. The current version is EasyTAG 2.4 which can be downloaded from the below link.

However in most of the standard Linux Distribution, the package is already available in repository and needs to be downloaded and installed from there.

On Debian/Ubuntu/Linux Mint

Open terminal using “Ctr+Alt+T” and add the third-party PPA to install latest stable builds of EasyTAG using following series of command with the hep of apt-get command.

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:amigadave/ppa $ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get install easytag

On RedHat/CentOS/Fedora

Here, you need to Enable EPEL repository and then install using yum command as shown.

# yum install easytag # dnf install easytag [On Fedora 22+ versions]

After successful installation, we can check the version and location of binary.

# easytag -version EasyTAG 2.1.7 by Jerome Couderc (compiled 23:14:56, May 10 2012) E-mail: [email protected] Web Page: http://easytag.sourceforge.net

# whereis easytag easytag: /usr/bin/easytag /usr/bin/X11/easytag /usr/share/easytag /usr/share/man/man1/easytag.1.gz

Now EasyTAG is ready to be tested. A GTK+ launcher can be found at the location ‘Sound & Video’ Menu.

How to Use EasyTAG

The working interface seems easy and used to. Nothing much to worry about. Very much simplified.

Chose an mp3 file and look at the tags, already associated with it, in the rightmost panel. Oh! so this was secret.

Editing the text with own data seems a cakewalk. It was easy and fluent.

Look at the picture tag, already associated with this mp3 file.

Remove the picture after uploading own picture and customizing it, as visible below.

Save the tags, so that the changes are taken into effect.

Look at the tags on from property windows. Hurrah! It was so simple.

Here comes the picture tag we associated with the mp3 file.

Trying to perform the same operation with a Video file. Here in this case none of the tags were there. We entered them from the starting point as depicted below.

No way to tag picture to a video file. Moreover tagging picture to video file seems meaningless, isn’t it?

Saved the above tag and then find the tags associated with the video file from property.

Area of Application

The EasyTAG application is the backbone of Industry dealing with Audio, Videos, Animation, etc to tag their data with information, Pictures and Copyright information so that the end user can have detailed information regarding the file they are dealing with Media Industry, TV shows over Internet, Videos over Internet,… actually the area of application of EasyTAG is beyond what we can think of.

Conclusion

EasyTAG is an upper-state of the end of the art which has a very simple interface yet powerful and productive applicability. It is a lightweight tool which is must if you deal with graphics tagging. A wonderful tool which is useful and on the other hand can be used as a prank to show your mates/colleges that an audio/video file has your personal data into tags.

However this tool works much beyond pranks in real world. Why don’t you make your hands dirty with this tool and tell us your experience.

That’s all for now. I’ll be here again with another interesting article. Till Then stay tuned and connected to Tecmint. Don’t forget to provide us with your valuable feedback in the comment section below.