As mentioned in my previous post on retagging MP3s by filename, I have a fairly large music collection, and prefer to keep it well organised.

I like the filenames used to always follow the same pattern, so I wrote mp3-rename, a Perl script to rename them based on the filename.

It takes a directory name as an argument (if not provided, it will operate upon the current directory). It will find all the MP3 files within that directory, extract information from the ID3 tags, then display a table showing the renames it will make if you tell it to go ahead, then ask for confirmation.

An example in action:

[davidp@supernova:~]$ mp3-rename /[...]/Rob\ Costlow\ -\ Woods\ of\ Chaos/
The following renames will be performed:
01 - Meant to Be.mp3    -> 00 - Meant to Be - Rob Costlow.mp3                                                           
02 - Reflections.mp3    -> 00 - Reflections - Rob Costlow.mp3                                                           
03 - Semester Days.mp3  -> 00 - Semester Days - Rob Costlow.mp3                                                         
[...]

Review the above renames to check the info is correct.

Type 'yes' to go ahead: ?>

(Some lines omitted for brevity)

It uses CPAN modules to do most of the work, including File::Find::Rule to find matching files to work on, Music::Tag to handle the tag processing, and Term::ReadKey to find out the terminal size.

I have a fairly large music collection in MP3s, and I like my files to be sensibly named and tagged.

One of the tools I use to do that is a Perl script I wrote named retag-by-filename, which allows you to provide a regular expression with named captures (so requires Perl 5.10 or later), and uses that to retag a bunch of MP3 files.

An example of it in use:

[davidp@supernova:~]$ ls -1 /shared/music/Complete\ Albums/Oasis\ -\ The\ Masterplan/ | head -3
01 - Acquiesce - Oasis.mp3
02 - Underneath The Sky - Oasis.mp3
03 - Talk Tonight - Oasis.mp3

[davidp@supernova:~]$ ./retag-by-filename --dry-run \
  --pattern="(?<track> \d+) \s - \s (?<title> .+ ) \s - \s (?<artist> .+ ) \.mp3" \
  /shared/music/Complete\ Albums/Oasis\ -\ The\ Masterplan/*.mp3
[01] Acquiesce by Oasis ()
[02] Underneath The Sky by Oasis ()
[03] Talk Tonight by Oasis ()

The --dry-run option shows the details of each track, but doesn’t actually update the tags. The --pattern option supplies the regular expression to match against filenames; you’ll use named captures named track, title, artist and comment to capture the appropriate parts. (In the example above, there is no comment to match.)

Thanks to the awesome power afforded by using modules from CPAN (Music::Tag and Getopt::Lucid), the actual script is 37 lines of code.

I recently followed a discussion on Twitter after @thomasmonopoly‘s Google account was blocked for unknown reasons, denying him access to the data he’d entrusted Google with.

I casually mentioned that entrusting Google to store all your data without having backups yourself is a bad idea, and @jmrowland enquired as to how you can back up stuff you create “in the cloud” (using Google).

I figured I should share the Perl script I’m currently using to back up my Google contacts, calendar and Google Reader subscriptions, so I’ve uploadedbackup-google-stuff on GitHub.

As I only wrote the script for my own use it’s quite basic and perhaps not particularly user-friendly, but I thought it only fair to share it; if people are interested in it, I may extend it somewhat. I’m fairly sure there are other “backup your Google account” solutions already out there already, though.

Of course, backing up mail from Gmail is trivial as they offer IMAP access; I don’t rely on Gmail so I’ve not bothered with that myself.

EDIT: I’ve seen Backupify recommended as a good solution for backing up your stuff from Google.