Linux Mint
Tagging MP3 Files with Puddletag on Linux Mint
A “fun” part of organizing an MP3 collection is harmonizing the tags so the datas work consistently with whatever management schema you prefer. My preference is management by the file system—genre/artist/year/album/tracks works for me—but consistent metainformation is required and often disharmonious. Finding metaharmony is a chore I find less taxing with a well structured tag editor and to my mind the ur-meta-tag manager is MP3TAG.
The problem is that only works with that dead-end spyware riddled failing legacyware called “Windows.” Fortunately, in Linux-land we have puddletag, a very solid clone of MP3TAG. The issues is that the version in repositories is (as of this writing) 1.20 and I couldn’t find a PPA for the latest, 2.0.1. But compiling from source is super easy and works in both Linux Mint 19 and Ubuntu 20.04 and version 2.20 on 22.04 which contains my mods to latinization of foreign scripts (yay open source!):
- Install pre-reqs to build (don’t worry, if they’re installed, they won’t be double installed)
- get the tarball of the source code
- expand it (into a reasonable directory, like ~/projects)
- switch into that directory
- run the python executable “puddletag” directly to verify it is working
- install it
- tell the desktop manager it’s there – and it should be in your window manager along with the rest of your applications.
The latest version as of this post was 2.0.1 from https://github.com/puddletag/puddletag
sudo apt install python3-pyqt5 python3-pyqt5.qtsvg python3-pyparsing python3-mutagen python3-acoustid libchromaprint-dev libchromaprint-tools libchromaprint1 wget href="https://github.com/puddletag/puddletag/releases/download/2.0.1/puddletag-2.0.1.tar.gz tar -xvf puddletag-2.0.1.tar.gz cd puddletag-2.0.1/ cd puddletag ./puddletag sudo python3 setup.py install sudo desktop-file-install puddletag.desktop
A nice feature is the configuration directory is portable and takes your complete customization with you – it is an extremely customizable program so you can generally configure it as fits your mental model. Just copy the entire puddletag directory located at ~/.configure/puddletag
.
Successful connect to WPA2 with Linux Mint 17
I found myself having odd problems connecting to WPA2 encrypted wireless networks with a new laptop. There must be more elegant solutions to this problem, but this worked for me. The problem was that I couldn’t connect to a nearby hotspot secured with WPA2 whether I used the default config tool for mint, Wicd Network Manager, or the command line. Errors were either “bad password” or the more detailed errors below.
As with any system variation mileage may vary, my errors look like:
wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-SCAN-STARTED wlan0: SME: Trying to authenticate with 68:72:51:00:26:26 (SSID='WA-bullet' freq=2462 MHz) wlan0: Trying to associate with 68:72:51:00:26:26 (SSID='WA-bullet' freq=2462 MHz) wlan0: Associated with 68:72:51:00:26:26 wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-DISCONNECTED bssid=68:72:51:00:26:26 reason=3 locally_generated=1
and my system config is reported as:
# lspci -vv |grep -i wireless 3e:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Wireless 7260 (rev 6b) Subsystem: Intel Corporation Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260 # uname -a Linux dgzb 3.16.0-38-generic #52~14.04.1-Ubuntu SMP Fri May 8 09:43:57 UTC 2015 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
I found useful commands for manually setting up a wpa_supplicant.conf
file here, and for disabling 802.11n here. The combination was needed to get things working.
The following successfully connects to a WPA2-secured network:
$ sudo su $ iw dev ... Interface [interfacename] (typically wlan0, assumed below) $ iw wlan0 scan ... SSID: [ssid] ... RSN: (if present means the network is secured with WPA2) $ wpa_passphrase [ssid] >> /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf ...type in the passphrase for network [ssid] and hit enter... $ sh -c 'modprobe -r iwlwifi && modprobe iwlwifi 11n_disable=1' $ wpa_supplicant -i wlan0 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
(should show CTRL-EVENT-CONNECTED
)
(open a new terminal leaving the connection open, ending the command disconnects)
$ sudo su $ dhclient wlan0
(should be connected now)