http://prokyon3.sourceforge.net/

The release candidate version has almost everything I want from a music metadata / organization application. Clean UI (despite being X-based), easy to mass edit tags, and cool bells and whistles like automatically importing album covers, band bios, album reviews, etc. And it stores all its data in MySQL, so adding on custom backend stuff looks pretty easy. The one big missing thing is customizable file renaming based on tag data (it only seems to have two hard-coded filename formats) but that's easily remedied with a bit of coding which I'll probably do and submit as a patch.

Anyway, if you're like me and are sick of relying on Windows apps manage your music, give this a shot.

This looks really cool. If you have it installed what does the 'SQL' tab do. Can I query using sql in that tab? Do you know how the front end interacts if using windows client, ie can it get data / files from a server ?

Wow. That looks pretty slick. And I like the fact that it (apparently) doesn't play the music itself. My biggest problem with iTunes (and there were many) was that if I just wanted to play a single track, maybe like a sample from Amazon or something, it wanted to import it into the iTunes database and play it, which meant waiting ages and dealing with all the crap leftover in the iTunes database afterwards.

I'm going to have to give this a shot.

How does it handle VA albums? I tag mine with the real artist and have the tracks in a playlist on the empeg (and in a directory on my fileserver). Does procyon automatically determine artists/albums or does it base it on the structure that already exists? If it's the former, that could be a real problem.

What I mean is that I notice on the left side of many of the screenshots there is a hierarchical list of Artist+Album. I have a number of VA albums. I tag the tracks in those albums with the correct artist name. Where will those tracks show up in that list? Will there be one-track albums for each different artist on that VA album, or will there be an entry for the album itself? In the best of all worlds, it'd be both.

Then you get into the possibility of having multiple VA albums with the same title, which isn't something that affects me (yet), but it could.

The sql part sounds cool too.

Even if it doesn't stream just tag/file manipulation would be cool. Besides my music is already on a linux box.

I'll have to check this out later. Thanks for the suggestion.

OK, so there's a separate album-centered hierarchical view that organizes Soundtracks, Compilations, etc. Probably not as automated as you're hoping for but it seems to work well as long as you're willing to manually mark the albums as Soundtracks, etc. after you import them. It does clobber the comment field with "Soundtrack" etc. to do this, though, so if you use comments for anything else, it might not be ideal.

I think This is what I've been looking for. I notice that it supports ogg, does that include FLAC?

The release candodate version says it does, and it links in libFLAC++ or whatever it's called. but I haven't tried messing with my FLAC files yet.

Oh, one major gripe I have, it seems that their ID3v2 tagging truncates fields at 30 chars, which is bogus. I need to figure out why it's doing that. No reponse from the developers yet.

Also, for anyone who's feeling adventurous enough to live on the bleeding edge, I submitted a patch to allow renaming of files based on a custom template. Check the prokyon3 sourceforge page under "patches."

this one is nice too:

http://amarok.kde.org/

(no i'm not using kde)