albums 0.1.25

Manage music albums, automatically correct tags, organize and sync copies with interactive command line interface.

albums

Manage a library of music: validate and fix tags and metadata, rename files, adjust and embed album art, clean up and import albums, and sync parts of the library to digital audio players or portable storage

• Read the documentation here

Overview

albums works with media files and tags, but primarily acts on "albums" rather than individual files. Everything is done locally and an Internet connection is not required. It's a command-line app but it is designed to be user friendly, with interactive menus, rich text formatting, tables and even blocky graphics.

It can work with a single folder or scan a whole media library into its database to make subsequent operations fast. It has many automated checks and fixes for metadata related issues such as track numbering (sequence, totals, disc numbers), album-artist tags, embedding cover art, etc. It supports marking albums as part of "collections," for example to make a list of albums to sync to a digital audio player. It can also perform the sync.

Why use albums instead of other music library tools?

Use them all, you don't have to decide. If you have missing metadata or unidentified recordings and you want to use online databases to fill in the blanks, MusicBrainz Picard is good for that. For editing tags with some fancy features and automation, puddletag and MP3TAG (proprietary but no cost for Windows version) are nice, while EasyTAG is simple and quick.

The purpose of albums is finding and fixing metadata problems, resolving inconsistencies and applying your preferred policies so that standard tags, cover art, filenames are just right. albums has many individually configured "checks" to find and sometimes automatically fix problems. You can review each change, or only the ones that require a choice. The documentation describes what each check does. albums can also help clean up and import new albums into your library and keep digital audio players synced.

Supported Media

FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, MP3/ID3 and M4A containers are supported. WMA files are read but albums doesn't comprehend their tags yet so most checks are skipped. Image files (PNG, JPEG, GIF, BMP, WEBP, TIFF, etc) in the album folder are scanned and can be automatically converted and embedded.

More formats and tag comprehension will likely be added if requested.

System Requirements

Requires Python 3.12+. Primarily tested on Linux and Windows. Should work on almost any 64-bit x86 or ARM system with Linux, macOS or Windows. (32-bit and wider OS support possible by dropping scikit-image library used for measuring image similarity.)