Kid3 Audio Tagger Released With New Features On Linux And Android

Kid3 is a versatile music audio tagger that works on multiple platforms. The application has seen a total of no less than four releases since the start of 2017, so it remains an active project. Improvements have been made across the board on all platforms, including Android (via downloadable .apk file).

If you are new to Kid3, here's the ReadMe file from the source code:

Kid3 - Efficient Audio Tagger With Kid3 you can:

• Edit ID3v1.1 tags - Edit all ID3v2.3 and ID3v2.4 frames
• Convert between ID3v1.1, ID3v2.3 and ID3v2.4 tags
• Edit tags in MP3, Ogg/Vorbis, Opus, DSF, FLAC, MPC, APE, MP4/AAC, MP2, Speex, TrueAudio, WavPack, WMA, WAV, AIFF files and tracker modules
• Edit tags of multiple files, e.g. the artist, album, year and genre of all files of an album typically have the same values and can be set together
• Generate tags from filenames
• Generate tags from the contents of tag fields
• Generate filenames from tags
• Rename directories from tags
• Generate playlist files
• Automatic case conversion and string translation
• Import and export album data
• Import from gnudb.org, TrackType.org, MusicBrainz, Discogs, Amazon 
• Kid3 uses Qt and runs under GNU/Linux (KDE or only Qt) and Windows

What's new?

Here are the major changes in version 3.6.0:

• Ratings can now be edited using Stars 
• Additionally, there is configurable mapping between the rating values and the number of stars, definable by the user 
• Further options include a maximum length for file names and the ability to show hidden files 
• Improved support for MP4 files 
• Bug fixes in the areas of folder directories on Windows
• The Android app has been updated to use Google's material Style

Photo courtesy of the project's homepage

The addition of the star rating system represents a modern and familiar way for users to quickly rate their media, and is a nice way to integrate sorting into the file manager, once dolphin regains those semantic abilities. In this case, a typical use case scenario would be for a user to sort files in dolphin that have, for example, an equal-to or higher than a 3-star rating in a particular genre, and use those search results to create a playlist.

While there are other ways to tag audio files on Linux, Kid3 is unique because that function is all it does. So it stands to reason it would be more robust, and likely a better way for those who want granular control over the tagging of their audio tracks. The ability to do so in bulk fashion, and with integration to online services baked-in, creates a one-stop shop for creating, editing, and managing your music tags across all major music file formats.

Installation instructions:

While not available yet as a Snap or Appimage, the download section of the project page has instructions for installing Kid3 on 'Buntu-based systems, openSuse, Arch, Gentoo, KaOS, Chakra, and Slackware. Debian packages have not yet been updated at the time of this writing.

For Ubuntu-based systems such as Kubuntu, KDE Neon, Linux Mint and the like, there is a PPA to stay up on the latest release.  The following commands will get you up and running:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ufleisch/kid3
sudo apt update
sudo apt install kid3

Of note, non KDE Plasma users can install Kid3 without any KDE dependencies by substituting kid3 for kid3-qt, as shown below:

sudo apt install kid3-qt

More detailed information regarding the project and this release  can be found on the project's Sourceforge page.