AutoTag
AutoTag is a utility written in C# for automatically tagging and renaming TV show episodes or films. AutoTag was inspired by an application I had been using for several years, Auto TV Tagger, which performs the same function, but I always had a few issues with it, namely that it often failed to give useful error messages and couldn’t handle invalid file name characters, meaning that I had to manually tag some files, which was annoying. I was unable to find any other alternatives which fulfilled my requirements of both renaming and tagging automatically, so I decided to create my own solution instead.
Despite being my first C# project, development of AutoTag went smoothly and quickly, probably due to the fact that C# basically only differs from Visual Basic.NET in syntax. I did struggle to get some of the API working due to quite poor documentation, but because the source code for the wrapper was available, I could work it out quite easily from that. This project also taught me about the use of async and await instead of the BackgroundWorker method I had previously been using, which I actually found to be much easier to work with than the BackgroundWorker.
In summer 2020, I released version 3, which is a rewrite of AutoTag using .NET Core. This allows AutoTag to be run natively on Linux, without Mono. AutoTag v3 also has a fully-functional command-line interface, which is useful when tagging files on my headless media server. However, v3 has only a command-line interface, not a graphical interface. This is because creating a cross-platform GUI is currently quite difficult due to the poor documentation of any frameworks that support both Windows and Linux. AutoTag v3 has been designed such that the core functionality is separated, which should allow a GUI version to be more easily created in the future.
AutoTag uses data from themoviedb.org using their free API, accessed through the TMDbLib wrapper. File name parsing is provided by a part of SubtitleFetcher and file tagging is provided by taglib-sharp.
Source code and binaries are available on my GitHub here.
AutoTag v2 interface