How to Tidy Up Your Music Collection with BASH and metaflac

I recently ripped my 450 or so CDs to FLAC using Audio CD Extractor (Sound Juicer) for my SqueezeCenter. This does a really good job since it will automatically retrieve track information from MusicBrainz. The final step is to add album art to the files (there’s already a cover.jpg file in each album folder.)

After trying just about every tagger suitable for Ubuntu (and compiling Pinky-Tagger.) I quickly realised that this would be a long and tedious task… unless I could do something using the BASH command line. This is what I did.

First, remove all existing artwork:

$ find . -name "*.flac" -type f -execdir metaflac --remove --block-type=PICTURE {} \;

Unfortunately, it’s not possible to mix major operations so you’ll only see errors output from this instruction. If you want to test first replace –remove –block-type=PICTURE with –show-tag=TITLE. For example:

./Giacomo Puccini/La Bohème (Berliner Philharmoniker feat. conductor: Herbert von Karajan, soprano: Mirella Freni, tenor: Luciano Pavarotti)/Giacomo Puccini-La Bohème (Berliner Philharmoniker feat. conductor: Herbert von Karajan, soprano: Mirella Freni, tenor: Luciano Pavarotti)-04-La Bohème: Act I. "Si può_" (Benoit).flac: ERROR: reading metadata, status = "FLAC__METADATA_CHAIN_STATUS_ERROR_OPENING_FILE"

The FLAC file could not be opened.  Most likely the file does not exist
or is not readable.

I had three such errors in over 6,000 tracks.

Finally, add the cover art:

find . -name "*.flac" -type f -execdir metaflac --import-picture-from="cover.jpg" --show-tag="Title" {} \;

If you try this, test on one or two folders first (it’s recursive) and back up your important files!