One of the handy things about MP3 files, and other digital formats, is that you can include extra information in them. For example, I’ve just updated the USB stick I use in my car to switch round some of the tracks and the extra information means I can look for a particular artist or album rather than having to dig down through a list of file names and the information is clearly displayed on the screen if a song catches my ear and I want to see what it is. A couple of months ago, I switched to MusicBee as my music player of choice – I’m still happy with it but, yesterday evening, I couldn’t find the ability to edit tags that I’d got used to with the Clementine / Strawberry line of software.

Since I’m getting back into more regular use of command line tools at the moment, I decided to look for a command line tool for a group of new files I needed to edit. The article Editing MP3 Tags on Linux led me to id3v2, which I’m fairly sure I’ve used in the past (or an earlier version of it). It isn’t as fully featured as the other suggestion of eyeD3 but it was easy to install on the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) (apt install id3v2). I was able to make short work of updating the files to show the information I needed to group them together – they are demo pieces I’ll be singing on later this month but came without any tagging.