GNOME Music is a capable music player for the GNOME desktop, but it lacks many of the features that make rival apps like Rhythmbox and Clementine so popular.

I might be old school but I still to use a desktop media player to play local media files on my Ubuntu desktop, and not solely subsist on streaming those stored in t’cloud (disclaimer: I do use Spotify regularly, but only to listen to music I don’t own. I haven’t bought new music in several years).

GNOME Music isn’t my favourite desktop music player for Linux, but it comes close, especially since the library scanning antics that failed me before are (mostly) fixed in the 3.18 release available to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS users.

As part of Google Summer of Code 2016, it’s finally getting a sorely missed feature: audio tag editing.

There are some great standalone tag editors for Linux — I’m sure many of you will share your preferred application in the comments section below — but, for my use cases (which is largely reassigning track numbers and removing errant capital letters in title) nothing beats being able to editing music track data right where I interact with the music file itself, e.g., Right-click > Edit Track Info.

Solving this as part of GSoC16 is bio-tech student and GNOME developer Saiful Bari Khan.

Khan ‘aims to add basic tag editing functionality to GNOME Music‘ so that it is ‘…more than just a read-only view of user’s music collection’.

The aim, Khan explains in a blog post, is to add:

“…a feature to allow users to edit and add metadata to their music files […] as this not only lets the users organize their music collection better but also get rid of ‘Unknown’ tags that may riddle one’s library.”

Even more tantalizingly the feature is to offer acoustic fingerprinting to automatically match tracks against an online database of track metadata:

“The cool thing to know about this feature would be that it would allow for fetching metadata using acoustic fingerprints which has prevailed in closed source software but is gaining popularity fast in open source projects as well. This is a very neat algorithm for comparing music data for very accurate identifications.”

Hit the source link below to learn more about the progress of the feature on Khan’s blog. If all goes to plan you can expect to find meta-tag editing included in GNOME Music as part of the GNOME 3.22, due for release in the Autumn.