Kid3 is a powerful audio tag editor for KDE, with support for popular formats like Ogg Vorbis, MP3, MP4, FLAC or WAV, features like multiple file tag editing (to edit fields which are the same for a batch of files), exporting to various online services, lyrics fetching, id3v1 and id3v2 MP3 tag editing, plugins, tag removal functionality, filters, next and previous buttons to quickly cycle through music files. I believe Kid3 to a gem for audiophiles who work often upon their music collection.

The 3.1.2 release of Kid3 is mostly a bug fix release, with only one new feature: the ability to change permissions to read-only files. The full changelog includes the following fixes and improvements:

• Allow user to change the file permissions of read-only files.
• Updated Simplified Chinese translation.
• Reduce number of open file descriptors with TagLib >= 1.8.
• Adapted to Discogs server update.
• Correctly add missing frames when editing multiple files.
• The value of an existing frame on multiple files can be set via D-Bus.
• File names with special characters in Mp4V2Metadata on Windows.
• Appdata passes appdata-validate check.

The Configuration dialog allows to change tag settings, set user actions or configure plug-ins. You can select or deselect a huge number of pre-defined tag names as well.

Kid3 is indeed an invaluable tool for those of us who need a powerful tool to edit and modify tags of audio files, and it’s probably the most complete there is, not only for KDE but for other DEs as well. Yes, usually any music player includes tag editing functionality, but Kid3 is specialized in this direction, and has some unique features and options that make tag editing faster and easier than in rudimentary tag editors included in players.

Install Kid3 3.1.2 in Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 14.10 and Mint 17

The KDE-Apps page provides DEB packages for the 64-bit version of Ubuntu 14.10 only. I provided instructions on how to install the latest release in this article. Basically, you will have to install the core libs and then the Kid3 DEB package (either the KDE or the Qt version) from here.

sudo dpkg -i kid3-core_3.1.2-0utopic_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i kid3_3.1.2-0utopic_amd64.deb

To install Kid3 3.1.2 in Ubuntu 14.04 or Mint 17 (both 32-bit and 64-bit versions), you will need to compile and install it from source, since there doesn’t seem to be a PPA containing this latest release.

1. Install the dependencies

sudo apt-get build-dep kid3

2. Download the source tarball

Get the source tarball from here (direct link here), then uncompress it:

tar -xf kid3-3.1.2

3. Compile and install Kid3

Change the working directory to kid3-3.1.2 and issue the following commands:

mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make
sudo make install

Kid3 will be installed as /usr/local/bin/kid3.