Tag up your music collection with Cowbell

 

In these days, many of us own multiple media devices. And even if we own but one, mp3s on our hard disks aren't going to tag themselves automagically! As such, even in this age of advanced computing, when smart devices rule our pockets and lives alike, tag editors are a necessity. At least, that's my feeling anyway. And this is why I am a big fan of Cowbell.

Developed by Brad Taylor and dubbing itself as an 'elegant music organizer' (for good reasons), Cowbell is essentially a simple tag editor, that aims at minimalism coupled with flexibility. Unlike its more massive cousins like Entagged and EasyTag, Cowbell intend to make the entire ordeal of tagging your files a fun experience, rather than an incessant fiddling with fields, shortcuts and functionalities.

Use

Cowbell sports a very simple interface, which is easy to learn and use. There's a list of mp3 files, that are currently being worked with, on the left hand side, and a simple set of fields to fill, on the right part of the interface. Cowbell treats easy import of mp3s on the basis of multiple selection, and it can import whole directories as well.

Folder-based keeping of music might seem a little outdated, especially in this era of online music streaming services, but it's effective, nonetheless.

Cowbell simplifies things with just 3 keyboard shortcuts to learn: Ctrl+O for opening mp3s/folders, Ctrl+S for saving your tag information and Ctrl+L for clearing the current list. Of course, you can use the GUI to do that, but learning the keyboard shortcuts speeds things up.

Ctrl+G makes Cowbell search Amazon's Soap database for and attempt to fill the tags automatically. However, not every song is there on Amazon, right? Therefore, manually editing the tags is still useful.

Once you hit Ctrl+O and import a file/folder, it is visible inside Cowbell. Just select it, and the text fields such as Artist, Album, Year and Genre become editable. Now, just enter whatever tags you wish to, and hit Ctrl+S for saving your changes. Ctrl+L then clears the list. Yes, it's as simple as that. 

Features 

1. Simple UI

2. Fast and lightweight

3. Integrated with Amazon's Soap database

Installation 

Cowbell is available on the official Ubuntu repository, and you can install it using the Software Centre or Synaptic, or use the following command in your terminal:

$ sudo apt-get install cowbell  

Known bugs/issues 

Since Ubuntu 12.04, many users have reported that the automatic filling of tags using Soap fails in Cowbell. The reason behind this might be the incorrect URLs that still populate the software's somewhat outdated code. Till now, this hasn't been debugged.

If you face this issue, the only usability Cowbell can offer you, is its flexible manual editing. To be honest, that's what I use it for.

Another problem with Cowbell is its inability to handle large music collections. If you try to import more than 20 songs at a time, it may slow down a little. But don't attempt to do so with 200 songs!

Verdict

Well, Cowbell is elegant, most certainly, but it's simultaneously pretty basic and limited in its functionality. As such, it may not appeal to hardcore tagging enthusiasts, but being a small and lightweight program that it is, it can often be helpful for those quick edits to music tags we often perform.

I have an old but hardy Phillips GoGear Muse, the 8GB variant, which I have recently started reusing. After buying my first Android, the Muse fell into disuse, and was stacked up with a bunch of old hardware. However, I decided to use it again, thanks to its battery life, as a mp3 player. And since the Muse isn't an online device, I had to manually edit tags for mp3s, before inserting them. And Cowbell made my day.

At the end, Cowbell may not be too advanced or feature-rich, but that's part of its charm.