Changing the Album on FLAC files from the command line in Linux

Question

I have a folder of FLACs that I want to change the album on. I use Ubuntu linux with Gnome. Is there a command line program that can do what I need? I can't seem to find an appropriate program.

Ideally it would be something like...

flacchange --Album NewAlbumName *.flac

Any help would be appreciated!

Answer 1

Metaflac is what you want
http://flac.sourceforge.net/documentation_tools_metaflac.html

Answer 2

You can do this with the metaflac tool (man page), which should be available from the flac package (I use debian).

You want to remove the old tag first, and then add the tag again with the correct values. Here is the artist tag for example:

metaflac --remove-tag=artist *.flac
metaflac --set-tag=artist="Beyoncé" *.flac  

And here's a short demo of changing the artist tag on a couple of example files:

burnsba@gigadeb:/mnt/datadrive/dump/test/dir1$ ls
11 - All Night.flac  12 - Formation.flac

burnsba@gigadeb:/mnt/datadrive/dump/test/dir1$ metaflac --show-tag=artist *.flac
11 - All Night.flac:ARTIST=Beyonce
12 - Formation.flac:ARTIST=Beyonce

burnsba@gigadeb:/mnt/datadrive/dump/test/dir1$ metaflac --remove-tag=artist *.flac
burnsba@gigadeb:/mnt/datadrive/dump/test/dir1$ metaflac --show-tag=artist *.flac
burnsba@gigadeb:/mnt/datadrive/dump/test/dir1$ 
burnsba@gigadeb:/mnt/datadrive/dump/test/dir1$ metaflac --set-tag=artist="Beyoncé" *.flac
burnsba@gigadeb:/mnt/datadrive/dump/test/dir1$ metaflac --show-tag=artist *.flac
11 - All Night.flac:artist=Beyoncé
12 - Formation.flac:artist=Beyoncé

Answer 3

If you want a general command-line tagger that should work the same for any music file regardless of the format, try pytags, included in the pytagsfs package.