Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] tag editing caps

[Alex Lancaster <alexl users sourceforge net>]

M> Peter Steiner wrote:

>> i would like to know if tag edit capabilities are planned for
>> integration into rhythmbox. ..........

>>>>> "M" == Matt   writes:

M> It's actually already in CVS at least.  pass --enable-tag-writing
M> to configure and you should be able to edit lots of tags.  I still
M> have trouble with some, but chances are that's my fault. :)

Yes, it's not enabled by default and most distributions shipping
rhythmbox don't enable it because it's still marked as "experimental",
mainly because of issues with the gstreamer plugins that actually do
the retagging.

With recent changes to the gstreamer-plugins-good in CVS (soon to be
released, I believe) the retagging just got a whole lot better.
Retagging of ID3-tagged MP3s, at least, is now (almost) lossless
(meaning that tags that gstreamer doesn't know about such as the TCOM
"composer tag" aren't removed from the MP3 file), with the exception
of comment tag weirdness:

http://bugs.gnome.org/348761 and http://bugs.gnome.org/348762

OGG retagging is still pending being added to gstreamer in CVS.  Not
sure about FLAC retagging.

Given that retagging support is now much better, I wonder if it might
be possible to allow the tagging support to be built in rhythmbox by
default for the next release.  Maybe we could somehow disable by
default at runtime, but allow it be enabled by a gconf and/or
preferences key, or maybe via a plugin?

We could also have a warning to the user that the tags that will be
written will be ID3v2.4 which many other taggers in Linux won't read
(e.g. id3lib, tagtool and easytag all only support up until ID3v2.3).
It could also check whether the gstreamer plugin versions are new
enough to support the "lossless" retagging.

Alex