Dear fellow monks,

Just wanted to share an experience of how Perl made life easier (again !).
I like to organize my MP3's by giving them file names of the form "Author - Song".mp3... for some reason I despise MP3's ID3 tags.
Since a newer version of Winamp came in, it made up ID3v2 for all songs, and in winamp's playlist screen I see "no artist - no title" for all, and that's annoying. Changing thousands of MP3's manually is not fun enough to even start doing it, so I was mad for some time.

Today I finally decided to get it over with !
My MP3's are on the Win2k workstation, no Perl there (it's on the AIXes/Linuxes)... No problem, download Cygwin's Perl 5.8 port. Works great... OK, going to search.cpan.org, MP3::Tag seems suitable... Installing... Hmm, it's pretty complicated... Tinkering with the examples for a few minutes... Viola !
Another 15 minutes, and I had the following script that removes all ID3 tags from a given list of MP3's, 
use MP3::Tag;

foreach $filename (@ARGV)
{
    print "$filename\n";

    $mp3 = MP3::Tag->new($filename);

    # read an existing tag
    $mp3->get_tags();
      
    if (exists $mp3->{ID3v2})
    {
        $id3v2 = $mp3->{ID3v2};
        $id3v2->remove_tag();
    }
    
    if (exists $mp3->{ID3v1})
    {
        $id3v1 = $mp3->{ID3v1};
        $id3v1->remove_tag();
    }
}

[download]
and in another 5 minutes I have a nice, correct, Winamp playlist.

In reply to Using Perl to organize my MP3's by spurperl

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