porges

Here’s the first in what may be an ongoing series of posts on my blog, mainly to give me something to write about! They may (or may not) be in the form of short reviews of various Linux software, so here we go:

Cowbell is an music tag editor for Gnome that boasts two things: a simple, clean interface, and a cunningly-named website. The first thing that struck me upon opening it was that it did, in fact, have an interface that was both simple and efficient. All too many Gnome programs seem to have given up good interfaces for something that is apparently ‘simple’, but ends up being more infuriating to use. Cowbell’s Amazon lookup service is usable, but I would have preferred something extra—MusicBrainz integration perhaps; Amazon doesn’t seem to pick up ‘obscure’ music very well.

However, my main gripe with the program is that while it boasts that it is a ‘music organizer’, the program lacks the facilities to deal with large numbers of songs. The input is limited to selection of files, and has no support for directories either recursive or otherwise. In this aspect it falls behind other music-tagging programs, or even some music players like amaroK.

In other aspects, Cowbell shines. Its simple abstraction-away of the various tagging formats makes it much easier to manage than the plethora of options that EasyTag and its ilk present you with. I also like the simple format for the track-renaming feature, although again this is lacking features geared towards large collections of songs. For example, attempting to set the format for track-renaming to include folder information, such as ~/Music/Artist/Album/Track.Artist - Track results in files with that as their title!

Overall, Cowbell is good at what it does. The interface is the best I’ve ever used amongst the various music-taggers I’ve tried. However, it needs more work in order to be able to deal with large collections of songs. As it is still early days for this project, it is definitely one I’ll be keeping my eyes on.