The purpose of beets is to get your music collection right once and for all. It catalogs your collection, automatically improving its metadata as it goes using the MusicBrainz database. Then it provides a bouquet of tools for manipulating and accessing your music.
Because beets is designed as a library, it can do almost anything you can imagine for your music collection. Via plugins, beets becomes a panacea:
- Fetch or calculate all the metadata you could possibly need: album art, lyrics, genres, tempos, ReplayGain levels, or acoustic fingerprints.
- Get metadata from MusicBrainz, Discogs or Beatport. Or guess metadata using songs’ filenames or their acoustic fingerprints.
- Transcode audio to any format you like.
- Check your library for duplicate tracks and albums or for albums that are missing tracks
- Browse your music library graphically through a Web browser and play it in any browser that supports HTML5 Audio and lots more.
Tag Archives: Library
YAFS ~ Changing Song Order On USB Sticks
Some players display, or play files, in the order that the file was originally copied to a USB drive or stick. YAFS (Yet Another FAT Sorter) allows the order to be changed to whatever you prefer. YAFS is a multi-platform, open source, freeware, command line utility with a GUI (Graphical User Interface).

Website
Visual YAFS ~ Frontend
Ex Falso / Quod Libet ~ Tag Editor / Player
Quod Libet is a GTK+-based audio player written in Python, using the Mutagen tagging library. It’s designed around the idea that you know how to organize your music better than we do. It lets you make playlists based on regular expressions (don’t worry, regular searches work too). It lets you display and edit any tags you want in the file, for all the file formats it supports.
Unlike some, Quod Libet will scale to libraries with tens of thousands of songs. It also supports most of the features you’d expect from a modern media player: Unicode support, advanced tag editing, ReplayGain, podcasts & Internet radio, album art support and all major audio formats – see the screenshots.
Ex Falso is a program that uses the same tag editing backend as Quod Libet, but isn’t connected to an audio player. If you’re perfectly happy with your favorite player and just want something that can handle tagging, Ex Falso is for you.

Website
Download
Features
Guide
Screenshots
Quod Libet Companion Plugins
freedb.org ~ Metadata Lookup Service
Sadly, this service was terminated as of March 2020, apparently due to corporate indifference.
freedb was a free CD and music database service to look up textual metadata about music, audio or data CDs. This was done by a client which queried the freedb database. As a result, the client displayed the artist, CD title, track list and some additional information. Clients are for example CD players, CD rippers and CD burning software.
www.freedb.org
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedb
Alternative CDDB servers:
- freedb.dbpoweramp.com – defunct link
- gnudb.org
Resources:
- archive.org/details/freedb
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedb
- libcddb.sourceforge.net
- sourceforge.net/projects/cddbnet
