In the BeOS glory days, the RipEnc shell script was the premiere MP3 ripping/encoding solution, and made full use of the database-like BeOS filesystem to store MP3 metadata. After I left the BeOS world, others took over the script. The current version is available at BeBits. The version here is the last one created and maintained solely by me.
Two downloads are available – a .pkg installer for people still running BeOS/Haiku, and a text version for people without access to BeOS but curious about the command line tools BeOS provided to manipulate the filesystem database.