I’ve got a podcast and it’s a chore to update. I’ve built some tools to help me produce an RSS feed for the podcast, which is a good thing, since RSS = XML = too persnickety to do by hand. But I’ve had to do some of the work by hand, specifically, tagging the .MP3 files with the appropriate ID3 tags. I was using iTunes, which has never been very fun, and seems to get worse with each iteration.

Enter eyeD3. It’s a tag editor, but unlike most of them, you can operate it from the command line. Better yet, eyeD3 understands ID3 v. 2.X tags. The documentation for the classic eyeD3 interface is what I like best. You can use it to set all kinds of tags for your podcast. Like these v2.x tags here. If you want to set one of the date tags, you’ll need to know how to specify a date in ISO 8601 format.

Also, did you know that mp3info lets you get the length of an audio file from the command line? I didn’t, until I read it on the internet, and durned if it’s not true. That’s pretty nifty. And there’s even a Ruby API for it!

I also learned about something called mutagen, which is like eyed3 but for arbitrary types of audio files.

I spent the day learning all this, so my tools still need to be updated to do what I now know can be done programmatically. But I’ve done the hardest part, viz.: