PGID3 Tag Editor 2.02

PGID3 is an ID3v1 and v2 tag editor for manipulating the information on files such as MP3s. PGID3 Tag Editor project is written in PHP and uses PHP-GTK, so it can take advantage of the GTK+ Toolkit for rendering a GUI.

The program itself is broken into three parts, a PHP Function Library called Pid Three (Pid3), a PHP CLI interface (PCLID3), and the GTK+ GUI itself. All three parts come together ready to go, so do not go freaking about uber amounts of dependencies to fill. All together they create the PGID3 Tag Editor.

"But Bob," you might say, "PHP is for the web!" Sure it is, but you should then check out the link below for the PHP Command Line Interface. That document describes using PHP to develop shell and desktop applications. Why PHP? Because I like to abuse it, that is a little hobby of mine.

Simply, PGID3 is an ID3 tag editor for MP3 files. The ID3 tags are what tell your media player the information about the tune such as title, album, etc. You can get by with slack tags if you just use a player like XMMS or Winamp, but if you have a portable like an iPod or some kind of database for the files, then correct and neat tags are a must. PGID3 can handle both the v1 and v2 of ID3 tags.

As for the program itself, it is the combonation of three seperate pieces that together work to create a user friendly envrionment to manipulate your ID3 tags. The base of it all is the Pid Three Function library, which is a fully custom set of functions for the reading and writing of ID3 tags. Since these are seperate from the application itself, the actual dirty work of messing with the data can be easily updated as well as easily included into other projects.

The second part of PGID3 is the Command Line Interface that I have lovingly called PCLID3. Using this you can manipulate your tags from the command line without using any type of graphical front end. By not having this built into the GUI, the opportunity is left open to build alternate GUIs, or even just not use any at all.

The third and final piece is the PHP-GTK GUI. This is the actual PGID3 component, though all of the parts together form a complete package under the PGID3 name. I designed this GUI to be light, compact, and solve as many problems in one spot as possible. As a bonus feature, PGID3 has built in intergration with QueryXMMS which is a command line utility for Linux that can ask XMMS what is currently playing so PGID3 can open it. This speeds up editing of playlists considerably.

Enough acronymns, what about features? Well, it is an ID3 editor so the features I would expect to find in one is what it has. It has the ability to read, write, and strip ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags from files. You can open a file from anywhere in the filesystem with a dialog, or using the above mentioned QueryXMMS integration you can zap right to whatever XMMS is playing.

If you leave the comment field blank when you write a tag, it fills it in automaticly with "Tagged by PGID3" which might be an easily disabled in future releases - depends if I get any feedback on that. It also automaticly removes excess whitespace on the end of tags which if I recall correctly happens because Winamp pads with spaces instead of nuls. Anyway it cleans that for you. Stripping a tag automaticly unchecks the related checkbox for writing it back, and the boxes are dynamicly checked as you load a file depending if it already has a v1 or v2 tag.

There are also a few keyboard shortcuts. F1 toggles the Write ID3v1 checkbox, and F2 toggles the Write ID3v2 one. F9 opens the currently playing file in XMMS, and naturally Enter writes tags.