Category Archives: Overview

When you play a music file in your favorite music player, or in your portable media player the track name, album, artist, lyrics gets displayed. You can search the songs with artists, album names. Even some of the tracks come with album art too, but there is no image file anywhere. The question generally arises, where does these information come from? The answer is straight forward; this metadata about the audio track is stored inside the audio file itself. The different audio files need different codecs. Different audio format files also have different such metadata systems. For example The Vorbis comments, APE tag, ID3 tags etc.

The most common and popular audio media (although not the best) is the mp3 . Mp3 audio format stores this metadata inside the music file, either at the beginning or at the end or at both locations. The music metadata system used with mp3 is called an ID3 Tag.
We will rip off the ID3 tag and check out what’s inside it in this article. We will discuss about ID3v1.x and ID3v2.x tags.

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