Advanced Guide
Contents |
So, you've read Cowbell, By the Numbers and it left you aching for more. Whats next? Well, you're in luck! This guide purports to examine each and every advanced feature Cowbell has to offer, step by step. If theres anything that you don't see here thats included in Cowbell, please feel free to add it.
Renaming Files
In addition to Cowbell's wonderful tagging features, it can also rename your files according to a pattern when you save. To enable this option, go to Tools -> Preferences. You should be presented with a dialog that looks similar to the one below.
If "Rename files according to song information" isn't checked, enable it by clicking the checkbox on the left. Now, the Pattern field should be completely visible. Pick a filename pattern from the drop down or make your own using the tokens listed below.
- Artist -- replaced with the Artist's name
- Album -- replaced with the name of the Album
- Title -- replaced with the Title of the song
- Track -- replaced with the track number, padded with 0s to the length of the longest track number (e.g.: if there are 10 songs in the album, the first track will be 01, 100 songs being 001, etc.)
- Genre -- replaced with the Genre of the Album
- Year -- replaced with the year the album was released
Saving Album Covers
Since Cowbell uses Amazon to guess song information, it can also download the album's cover image for display, and for later use. Simply check the "Cache album cover with songs" checkbox in Tools -> Preferences (see above screenshot) to enable it.
Batch Tagging
To supplement Cowbell's excellent graphical tagging, it also offers a command-line based batch tagger for large tagging jobs. To tell Cowbell to put on its work gloves and get dirty, run it with the following argument:
$ cowbell --batch /path/to/your/music
The following is a sample session when running Cowbell's batch tagging mode:
$ cowbell --batch My\ Music/ Searching /home/brad/My Music/The Postal Service/Give Up... Found /home/brad/My Music/The Postal Service/Give Up Guessing Song Information... ====================================== Postal Service- Give Up 1. District Sleeps Alone Tonight 2. Such Great Heights 3. Sleeping In 4. Nothing Better 5. Recycled Air 6. Clark Gable 7. We Will Become Silhouettes 8. Place Is a Prison 9. Brand New Colony 10. Natural Anthem ====================================== Saving... Renaming files... Done!
When the batch tagging mode is enabled, Cowbell will descend in to the deepest directory and assume that is where your albums reside. Then, for each album, it will guess the song information and allow you to either confirm or reject the changes made. If you have the preferences set correctly, it will also rename the files according to the updated track information. It will not, however, cache album covers to the filesystem because of a limitation in the current design.
