hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0636.txt

Episode: 636
Title: HPR0636: Kid3-qt
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0636/hpr0636.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 00:15:06

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The following program is WorkSafe and FamilySafe, so feel free to listen to it wherever and with whomever you like, unless sad songs make you cry because there's one of those at the end.
Hello and welcome again to Hacker Public Radio. I'm Pokey and I'll be your host for today. I am a big fan of not just podcast, but also audiobooks and audio books.
When I find an audiobook or a audiobook that I really like, I really like to share it with people I care about. And one of those people that I care about that also cares about audiobooks is my mom.
My mom is just the sweetest nicest lady that you'll ever meet. Everybody says so. Everybody loves my mom, but she's a little bit technologically challenged.
So sharing an audiobook or a audiobook with her is not the easiest thing to do. If she lived right down the street, it wouldn't be a problem, but since I live in New Hampshire and she lives in Alabama, I've got some, just a little bit of difficulty in doing that.
What I was doing at first is when I found an audiobook that I liked and that wasn't crass or rude, so I don't want to send my mom that kind of stuff of course.
I would put it on CD, just copy and paste the MP3 files onto the CD, make sure that all the song titles began with a number 0102, the preceding 0 of course.
And I would send her the CD and she had a television with a built-in DVD player and she would just pop the CD or the DVD if it was a large production into the DVD player in her TV and it was able to play the MP3 files and it would play each book progressively.
I liked to listen to those while she was sewing. She so was professionally for a living out of her home and she's got plenty of time to listen to audiobooks and audio books while she's sewing and she really appreciated that.
Someone she knows got sick and was kind of bedridden for a while and had no television in their bedroom and no way to really pass the time.
The mom felt bad for the person and wound up loaning them her television then of course it was the one with the DVD player in it.
Long story short, she never got the television back and she's just too shy, she's too embarrassed to ask for it back.
So I had to come up with another way for her to listen to audiobooks.
My solution to it was a cheap MP3 player which she could plug her laptop speakers into.
She couldn't listen to them on her laptop because she's too afraid to carry the laptop and move it out of the office where it's at.
She's just too afraid to move it.
So I thought I would get her a cheap MP3 player, a good one but a cheap one and she could plug computer speakers into it and listen out in her workshop.
What I came up with was the Sansa Clip Plus.
Anyone listening to a podcast is probably familiar with MP3 players and anyone familiar with MP3 players is probably pretty familiar with the Sansa Clip Plus.
It's got an editor's choice from just about any editor who's ever reviewed it.
It gets high marks for its capabilities, it can play aug vorbiz which I'm very happy with.
It's cheap, it has large memory that it comes with and it's expandable memory.
You can pop a micro SDHC card in there and put as much memory in there as you want as you can afford and swap it out.
It's a really nice little player.
What I did of course was bought her one for Christmas before giving it to her.
I opened it up and I loaded it up with audio books, ones that she hadn't heard yet and ones that I knew her favorite.
I put my hacker public radio episodes on there because she liked listening to those, she enjoys those a lot.
I put in a couple of other little podcasts here and there.
She's a big Nathan Lowell fan so I put the Linux reality on there with the interview with Nathan Lowell and she was thrilled with that.
I put all these things on there and went to test it out.
What I found out is that the Sansa clip plus does not play your files in order of file name.
Every MP3 player I've ever owned has simply looked at the file name and put them in numerical order and then alphabetical order after that and just played them in that order.
So if I had a whole book, say I wanted Nathan Lowell's book quarter share, I just made sure that all of the episodes were titled quarter share preceded by the episode number.
So 0, 1 quarter share, 0, 2 quarter share, etc. etc.
The Sansa clip plus doesn't care what the file name is.
What it cares about is the information in the ID3 tags.
So I found myself in need of an ID3 tag editor because I didn't know of a real easy way to edit ID3 tags.
So I went into the August Planet chatroom on irc.frino.net and I asked around.
Everybody's favorite podcaster, Klatto, came immediately up with the answer.
There's a small program called Kid3 or KID3.
Obviously it's a KDE application.
And while I was looking KID3 up in my synaptic package manager, I found KID3-QT.
I know I'm supposed to say cute here, but anyone who knows that QT is cute already knows and anyone who doesn't
isn't going to have any idea what I'm talking about if I say Kid3Cute.
So the name of the program is KID3-QT.
I imagine that the KID3-QT is probably pretty similar if not identical to KID3 except it comes with a lot fewer dependencies.
KID3 had a whole bunch of them like any K application.
If you're not using KDE already, it wants to pull in half of KDE.
Whereas Kid3Cute only wanted to bring in maybe three dependencies and that was good for me.
So I installed that. KID3 as a tag editor is very, very impressive.
It's very effective, it's easy to use.
And I thought I should just let some people know about that.
From the Kid3 handbook, I'm going to read you the introduction here.
And what it says, this is written, the program was written by, forgive me if I get this wrong.
Errs, Fleisch, F-L-E-I-S-C-H, his or her first name is Errs, U-R-S.
I have no idea if that's a man or a woman's name, never heard it before.
But according to the handbook, Kid3 is an application to edit the ID3-V1 and ID3-V2 tags in MP3 files in an efficient way.
Also, tags in AugVorbus, Flack, MPC, MP4, AAC, MP2, Speaks, TruAudio, WavePack, WMA, W-A-V, and AIFF files are supported.
It is easy to set tags of multiple files to the same values, example, album, artist, year, and genre in all files of the same album.
And generate the tags from the file name or vice versa.
So what that basically means is that you go into the features here, it edits ID3-V1.1 tags, sure it does.
And it edits ID3-V2.3 and ID3-V2.4 frames.
I don't know what a frame is, it looks like a tag to me in the context of this program.
Your ID3 tags identify whatever audio track they're attached to, two devices that can read ID3 tags.
Apparently, there's two different versions, version 1.1 or version 1 and version 2.
There appears to be more than one version of each, this handles each of them.
It allows you to edit tags of multiple files, is what it says here in its features.
Not only does it let you edit tags of multiple files, but it lets you edit tags of multiple files simultaneously.
This is real handy if you want to change, say, the artist's name and make them all the same within the same folder.
You can do that, you can do them all at once, not only will it do that all at once, but it will let you change multiple files within multiple folders.
You can do more than one folder at a time.
It tells you here that it can generate tags from a file name and it can generate file names from tags.
Generating tags from file names is going to be tricky.
It means that when you're naming your files, you've got to have a file convention that you stick with.
And then you have to kind of use the language that this is written in and is expecting to tell it what to expect out of it,
unless you're using the same file convention on many, many files.
It's probably quicker just to type them in.
If you have correct tags in all of your files, you can generate file names from that.
And that seems like a pretty handy thing to do if you want all that information right in the file name.
If you want the album artist, the album, the track number, and the name of the file all in the file name, you can do that.
This will do it for multiple files all at once and it will just automatically generate them.
And there's a couple more details in here.
It says it can do automatic case conversion and string translation.
I didn't play with any of that, so I can't comment on it.
But automatic case conversion would be pretty handy if you had files with camel casing and upper casing.
It can just change all that to lower case if you want or change it all to upper case.
Or it can capitalize the first letter of every word in the file name.
Or it can capitalize just the first letter of the file name.
It's pretty flexible.
I didn't play with it, but it says it can do it and I trust it because it's been good at everything.
I did need it to do.
According to the handbook here, it says that it can import tags from canooddb.org, tracktype.org, music brains, discogs, Amazon, and other data sources.
So it's got the ability to import music tags.
I'm not entirely certain how it does that with all those different things.
I know music brains kind of takes like a fingerprint of say a song that you're listening to and it can identify that song that way.
So it can just send back down the ID3 tag depending on what the fingerprint of the song is.
I imagine that probably would take a while to do, but if it was a batchable process, I can see that being real handy for a bunch of unknown music.
That sounds pretty cool.
I haven't played with that yet, but I do have some songs that I don't know the artist and I don't know the album they came from.
So I may wind up trying that eventually.
It also says that it can export these tags and export all the tag data as CVS, HTML, playlist, cover XML, cover with a K, and other formats.
And it also says that exported CSV files can be imported again.
So it does seem pretty flexible.
It's got a lot of a lot of features I never even played with, but as far as the features that I did play with, it worked really well.
So the way that K, ID3 looks, when you open it up, it seems to be a three-pain window.
There's a large pane from the top to the bottom of the window on the right, on the left there are two smaller panes.
And those are your navigation panes.
The upper left pane has the file names and the folders that you're dealing with.
The pane below it allows you to quickly navigate through folders and it's got folder up and folder down commands within that.
The big pane on the right is where most of the work gets done in KID3.
At the top it has the file name and you can edit the file name while you're doing this.
Down below that it has a couple of small command windows for creating a file name from a tag or creating tags from the file name.
I didn't use those, but it's very obvious how those would work once you're looking at it.
Just below that in the pane is another section with the ID3 V1.1 tag editor and below that is the ID3 V2.3.0 tag editor.
Each of these tag editors displays the information from the file that you've highlighted in the upper left hand pane.
So in the ID3 V1 tag, for instance, the first entry is title and you can change the title.
Next is artist, then album, then comment, then date, then track number, then genre.
Now I believe that ID3 V1 tags are limited to only those fields.
And in each of those fields you're limited to the number of characters and the character types that can be in there.
So the ID3 V1 tags may be less useful to you than the ID3 V2.
What I was able to do with the Sans Eclipse was just to remove the ID3 V1 tags completely and ignore them.
It saved me a little bit of work and the clip didn't seem to mind that they were missing.
And the tags, the ID3 V1 tags, were very simple to remove.
On the left hand pane where all the files are listed, you simply highlight more than one file at once.
You just click and drag to highlight all the files.
And to the right of the tag one section, you click the remove button and just remove them.
Just removed all the ID3 V1 information.
Down below, it left me with the ID3 V2 tag editor.
And I could highlight all them at once.
As you highlight them, what it'll do is it'll show you the information that is similar and it will tell you what that is.
So for instance, right now I'm looking at tracks 1 through 17 of disk 1 of Douglas Adams, the restaurant at the end of the universe.
Under artist, it says Douglas Adams. Under album, it says the restaurant at the end of the universe.
Under title, it has an equal sign with a line crossed through it to tell you that the titles are not equal.
Which is what you would prefer. You don't want equal titles.
You want them to be titled separately because you want one of them to be track 1 and the next to be track 2, etc.
Also not equal down lower on there are the track numbers themselves.
There is a field for track number. So those are not equal either.
But what is equal down here is the genre. It says book.
The album artist says unknown, which I could fix that.
Actually, you know what? The album artist is unknown because I don't know the name of the voice recorded it.
So I'll leave that as unknown. But that's all you would do.
If you wanted to change one, you could highlight where it says album artist unknown.
Type the name of the person who recorded the album in there and then check the box to the left of album artist.
And that would change that album artist for all 17 tracks and make those an equal value for all of the fields that have the non equal symbol.
If you want them to be non equal, then you go through one at a time and just verify that the naming convention is the same.
And in this file, for instance, it is not because track 1 has just titled the number 1.
It does not have a preceding 0.
And I know I want that to have a 0 before it because I know a lot of MP3 players care very much whether it's track 0 1 so that they can put that before track 1 0.
A lot of times you'll see that where you'll have track 1 and then right after it, it'll play track 1 0 and then 1 1 and then 1 2.
And it'll just skip it. You won't even see track 2, 3 or 4 because it wants that preceding 0.
So in this file, I'm going to change the title to 0 1 and I'm going to change the track number to 0 1.
Now if I click on track 2, track 2 already is 0 2 so that's been, that was correct when it went in there.
But track number is still just 2 so I have to put a 0 in there.
And I imagine I'll have to go through a 3 through 9 as well and put preceding 0s in the track numbers.
Now as I do all this, as I'm changing this information, this is a non destructive edit that I'm doing.
It hasn't actually changed anything. I can do any changes I want and if I decide at the end that I don't like them,
I can go up to the file menu here, open the file menu and click revert and change everything back as if I never touched the thing.
Or I can click save and then it will actually write out the changes to the files.
Now if you've changed a lot of files and you click save, it can take some time to do it.
And you'll get a little progress bar down at the bottom telling you how long it's taken to change all these.
As you highlight each file in the upper left hand pane, it will tell you just to the left of the file name,
whether it has a tag at all and if it does, it'll tell you which tag.
So for all these, they have both ID3 version 1 and version 2 tags so it says right next to it, V1 and V2.
If I make a change in any of them, that little V1 and V2 also changes.
It changes to a graphic of a floppy disk to tell you that a change has been made and that it needs to be saved.
And that's kind of handy to let you know where your changes are and where they haven't been done yet.
You can also in your tag data for an ID3 V2 tag, you can add JPEGs to this so that when you're playing your file on your MP3 player,
if it can display JPEGs, a lot of the players will have a picture behind it.
That's kind of handy. I never had any idea how those pictures got in there and why some of them had them and some of them didn't.
But apparently it's just because it's here in the metadata and you can manipulate that. You have control over that.
So I think I'm going to put a little picture in this particular episode and as long as Mr. Fallon doesn't remove that,
you'll see my picture in there. You'll see what I actually look like on your MP3 player if it'll display it.
And I don't imagine Ken will take that out of there. I bet he's probably pretty curious as to what I look like too.
This handsome guy in the end of the microphone with a face made for radio. So I think I'll put that in there as well.
That's about it for this piece of software. It's a very, very simple piece of software.
It takes a job that you may not want to do because you probably have a large collection of audio files.
And it makes it really simple and really easy to do.
Now a lot of it is manual, a lot of it's typing, so it is still very time consuming.
But for such a painful process, it really takes as much of the pain out of this as humanly possible.
It really, really simplified a task that I was really dreading. I mean, I bought my mom a four gigabyte MP3 player and a four gigabyte SD card.
And the idea was that I would just send her little micro SD cards in the mail to pop into this.
So this would be a never ending process for me of finding new audio books that I could share with her and editing the tag information and sending them out to her.
So I was really dreading this being a complicated process.
I've never found a program that would do it easily. I've used programs that did it in a nightmare-ish way.
Back when I was using Windows, Windows Media Player would do it and it was a nightmare.
I've tried other programs on Linux. I think maybe Banshee was even worse.
That was horrible to try and edit tags and that was just deplorable the way that they've got that set up.
Though it may not have been Banshee, so don't come after me for criticizing them because it might not be fully deserved.
But whatever program it was, it was just unbelievably bad.
And Kid3Cute here just does everything perfectly.
There is nothing that could possibly be improved on this piece of software as far as I can tell.
It's small, it's fast, it loads instantly, it's easy to use, it's easy to read, it's easy to understand what every piece of this program is designed to do.
And it lets you do it. It doesn't get in your way. It really makes a simple task out of something that would have otherwise been a very difficult task to do.
So if ever the author of this software hears this episode, I thank you wholeheartedly.
It's been a great help to me and I hope it's a great help to you also, dear listener.
That's about the end of the show. I'm going to wrap it up from there.
What I am going to do as I do with all of my shows is I'm going to close out with a song.
And since this particular episode was inspired by my mom and I know she's going to be listening anyway, I thought I would choose a song that she would appreciate.
My mom and I have a tradition of in the fall when she comes up to visit and back when she was living up here.
We would always go to a thing called Apple Fest together, which is at a local orchard.
And it was just Apple picking and good food up there and kind of like a picnic in a festival kind of atmosphere.
And what they had going on the whole time was these bluegrass bands and just various bluegrass bands and folk bands.
And I never heard a bad one pretty much. I've never heard a folk song that I don't like.
I've never heard a bluegrass song that I don't like.
And while going through song fight, I heard one that I just think is fantastic.
I haven't listened to a lot of his other music yet, but he does have a lot of it available in his website.
And the artist name is Brick Pig and his website is www.brickpig.com.
And he's got a blog as well and that's at www.brickpig.wordpress.com.
And he's got some entries in there. He seems to not have posted since about January of 2010.
But he's got some stuff there if you want to look at it.
And his website is fairly complete as far as an independent artist's website goes.
He's got a section with original songs. He's got a section with covered songs.
He's got a bio if you're interested in him and learning about him a little bit.
He's got links to stuff he's interested in and other bands linked to his blog.
He's got news about himself and he's got contact information, which is more than I've been able to find on most of the artists that I found on on song fight.
Like I said, this is as far as an independent musician goes.
This is a pretty complete website and I was pretty happy to find it and pretty impressed with what he's put up there.
It was pretty, it was a happy find.
So like I said, the artist here is Brick Pig and the song is Shreds.
This is just another example of the cleverness, the out of the box thinking that song fight seems to provoke and some of these guys where they take the song title.
Just a simple word, a single word here, Shreds and has built an entire song around it and the song is just fantastic.
It's just a beautiful song I think.
It's a little sad so if you don't like sad songs, get ready for it or skip it and it is a folksy song.
It's a bluegrass kind of a song and if you don't like that, go ahead and skip on by it.
But if you don't mind a song that might make you feel a little blue or it might pick you up if you're already blue and if you don't mind folk music, then stay tuned for this one because I really enjoyed it.
Thank you very much for listening to this episode of Hacker Public Radio. Please consider contributing your own episode as well.
When I act like nothing's wrong it must be working because everybody seems to think I'm fine and last night I didn't scream your name out loud.
And I didn't lie awake and stare at your side on the bed.
And yesterday you know I saw me cryin' these are the only shreds of dignity I am left.
I know I can't move around, must be in bed.
I know all the things I've been inside.
No one seems to know how much I've heard it.
No one seems to shame I'm in my eyes.
They don't see me looking at your picture.
They don't see me waiting by the phone.
They don't see me watching out the window.
They don't know I can't believe you called.
And last night I didn't scream your name out loud.
And I didn't lie awake and stare at your side on the bed.
And yesterday you know I saw me cryin' these are the only shreds of dignity I am left.
These are the only shreds of dignity I am left.
No one seems to know how much I've heard it.
No one seems to shame I'm in my eyes.