momtag

Mike's Opinionated Music Tagger

Opinions are like arseholes. Everyone's got one, and they all stink.

A screenshot of tags applied to Brain Hack by LukHash featuring Caspro.

What is this?

A tool for:

recursing a convention of folders and files
parsing artist, album, and track details from the folder and file names
finding and processing cover art files
applying everything as a standard set of tags to your music files

It basically keeps a small collection of music reasonably and consistently organised.

A hierarchy of folders and files representing a music library.

Why?

I like to purchase my music as MP3s from stores like Bandcamp. Our car has a USB port in its infotainment system which handles navigation by folder and file name, but then displays the tags on the dash display. Not everyone uploads their music with well-formatted metadata, and some music labels seem to see fit to use the metadata tags to advertise things like their websites. The inconsistency really gets on my nerves, but running adverts on songs I've already paid for is simply unacceptable.

While preparing this tool for release, I read Ben's recent blog post on personal music servers, such as Subsonic, Gonic, and Navidrome. In particular, he compares the different approaches taken by each server to organising their libraries. If you find yourself in a similar situation, this tool could work around design decisions taken by these servers by automatically re-tagging your files to match your folder hierarchy.

What is this not?

A tool for maintaining your carefully curated library of original files.

This will delete all the tags from your files and replace them with a basic, standard set of tags. Any special metadata you have saved in there will be lost. Keep a copy of your original files somewhere else.
A tool for tagging your FLACs and your Ogg Vorbis files.

My car doesn't play Ogg Vorbis, so that won't be supported. Honestly, if you can tell the difference between V0 MP3s and FLACs while driving, you're probably doing it wrong, and probably twice.

You'd likely want something like Strawberry Music Player instead.

Getting started

It's distributed via PyPI at the moment, so it can be run as a one-off with pipx.

$ pipx run momtag --dry-run --verbose ~/Music

A screenshot of a verbose run of momtag in progress.

I've made sure to use dependencies that are available from Debian's apt repositories, as I've a plan to build and deliver a .deb package in the future.

The code is available from my Codeberg repository. It's free software, so you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This tool is very deliberately named Mike's Opinionated Music Tagger. I don't group my music by genre, so I've not decided how to handle that in the hierarchy. I don't distinguish Lead Artists and Featured Artists, so I've not decided how to handle that either. If you need these features or otherwise disagree with my choices, please fork it and change it to suit your needs! I'd love to see some bomtags, domtags, nomtags and tomtags out there!

2025-12-09