occhange
Version 1.5.0 (16 September 2009), copyright ©2003-2009 Brett Scaife
Introduction
occhange is a Perl script for editing the comments in FLAC and Ogg Vorbis files.
"Ogg Vorbis is a fully open, non-proprietary, patent-and-royalty-free, general-purpose compressed audio format for mid to high quality (8kHz-48.0kHz, 16+ bit, polyphonic) audio and music at fixed and variable bitrates from 16 to 128 kbps/channel. This places Vorbis in the same competitive class as audio representations such as MPEG-4 (AAC), and similar to, but higher performance than MPEG-1/2 audio layer 3, MPEG-4 audio (TwinVQ), WMA and PAC."
In other words Ogg Vorbis is a much better way to keep your music collection on your computer - it's better quality and it's Free Software. Occhange provides an easy way to edit Ogg Vorbis comments from the command line. It's designed to be used for small numbers of changes to small numbers of files - it is not designed for batch processing of your collection of thousands!
FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, a compressed audio format that is lossless, meaning that audio is compressed in FLAC without any loss in quality. "FLAC stands out as the fastest and most widely supported lossless audio codec, and the only one that at once is non-proprietary, is unencumbered by patents, has an open-source reference implementation, has a well documented format and API, and has several other independent implementations."
As far as I can tell this script does everything it's meant to do; it catches most errors fairly neatly; and it doesn't seem to mangle files.
License
This program is free software; 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 program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty; without even the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
A copy of the GNU General Public License is distributed with this software.
Requirements
occhange requires:
- Perl
- Term::ReadLine::GNU
- vorbiscomment, which is part of the vorbis-tools package and should be installed on your system if you are using Ogg Vorbis files.
- metaflac, which is part of the standard FLAC installation
- file, which should be part of most GNU/Linux distributions
Installation
You could simply unpack the archive and copy the files you want to the locations you want them but I've written a shell script that will install the files for you. Download the archive and unpack it:
tar xjf occhange-1.5.0.tar.bz2
Change to the occhange-1.5.0 directory and type:
./install.sh
Detailed instructions are given in the archive file INSTALL.
Usage
occhange filename
What it does
Once Occhange has been invoked you have the following options:
- Changing a comment's value
- Changing the name of a comment
- Adding a new comment
- Moving a comment
- Deleting a comment
- Reset the comments to the last saved values
- Quit the script, saving your changes
- Quit the script without saving changes
Check the README file distributed with the script for more details on how to use it.
Download
Changelog
16 September 2009
v.1.5.0
- Added option to move comments up and down list
9 March 2008
v.1.4.0
- Added support for FLAC files
- Now requires file to be installed on system (to determine type of file being processed)
- Cleaned up a few references to unused variables
1 July 2007
v.1.3.1
- Changed license to GPL v3
- Fixed failure to read ReadLine history on startup
16 July 2006
v.1.3.0
- Now use Term::ReadLine::GNU to get comment names and values
- Changed colour of a warning
02 July 2005
v.1.2.1
- Added a version variable to the script to simplify updating it
- Added a man page
- Added a basic installation script
26 June 2005
v.1.2
- Colourised the interface
- Now puts a .occhange directory in the user's home directory for storing configuration files etc.
- Only outputs copyleft message on first use (stores a file in
~/.occhangeto record this - Changed location of temporary error file to
~/.occhange - Removed all the remaining confirmation messages - I was just finding them annoying and on the rare occasions they were useful the 'revert to saved' option was OK instead
- Tidied up some output formatting
01 March 2005
v.1.1
- Removed 'change case' option as I wasn't using it and the 'change name' feature (below) gave a way of doing this
- Added 'change name' option to allow the name as well as the value of a comment to be altered
- Changed the interface to improve usability: pointless messages removed, output formatted more nicely, keys used altered
01 Jan 2004
v.1.0
- No changes made to code but as it had functioned without error for a year I decided it really was a 1.0 version
05 Jan 2003
v.0.9
- Removed dependence on temporary files for making changes
- Improved basic error checking for things like file being writable
- Tidied up coding in places
- Corrected some spelling mistakes
01 Jan 2003
v.0.5
- Initial release
