smrt 0.4.1 review

smrt is a powerful python-based command line tool designed to ease the process of constantly renaming and tagging OGG and MP3 files.

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 30K Developer: Pio

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smrt is a powerful python-based command line tool designed to ease the process of constantly renaming and tagging OGG and MP3 files.

The main feature of smrt is the ability to identify tracks by making educated guesses, based on filename and tag data, against a gigantic database of all known CDs derived from the FreeDB project. This database may reside locally, or on a remote network server. smrt is also capable of tagging a file by its name, or naming a file by its tag.

All operations are extremely configurable; output names are configurable via a simple to use template string. Powerful regular expression options are available which can be used to mangle filenames, unmangle filenames, and indicate to smrt how to devine metadata from a given filename (thereby providing hints when guessing, as well).

A simple configuration file allows you to set very complex and useful defaults for your collection's naming format.

smrt was created with the goal of making sure you spend as little time as possible maintaining your file names and tags, while being configurable enough to allow you to tailor its behavoir to operate perfectly with the impeccable structure of your existing collection.

Requirements:
smrt has been successfully used on Python 2.3 and Python 2.4. smrt requires that pyid3lib and pyogg/pyvorbis be installed in order to parse and write tags. pysqlite2 is required in order to connect to a local FreeDB database (but not for network databases). The bzip2 module (included with the Python distribution) is required in order to import FreeDB tarballs.

Installation:

Notes:

smrt is still a fairly immature application, and as such, it does not have much of an installer. A simple script "install.sh" is provided that, when run as root, will install smrt in /usr/share/smrt and set up a link in /usr/bin for smrt. smrt's python import paths are currently just hard-coded, and smrt can run from either the default /usr/share/smrt, /usr/local/share/smrt, or simply from it's own directory.

Database Access:

Since the download on this site currently does not include the actual FreeDB database (which is 1.6 gigabytes!), you can only use the FreeDB entries if you create your own FreeDB database, or if you query against a network server. Currently, the only network server is my own, ran off my home cable, at mirrormere.longstair.com port 8812. Feel free to use it, but don't be surprised if it is down or goes down while you use it.

If you wish to create your own database, the included util/import_smrt_db script is capable of creating the actual FreeDB database. To run it, however, a small patch must be made in the python tarfile module (Comment out the lines self.members.append(tarinfo) -- this will cause no loss in functionality of tarfile, it just turns off some caching that ends up taking up way too much memory with the freedb multi-million file tarballs). For more information on creating your own database, see the comments in util/import_smrt_db.

What's New in This Release:
DB "Guessing" has been removed (it didn't work very reliably).
The CD DB search tool can now add track data to the selection.
A new "Text Filter" section to apply regexes and commands.
New in-application help dialogs.
A CLI rewrite.
Database imports support new FreeDB 7zip files.
New save options.
Bugfixes and much more.