phoxis Computer Science, Linux / Unix Shell

Bash Script: Reading ID3v1 Tags

mp3 files contain track name, artist name, etc meta data about the music file itself. The meta data format used in mp3 files are called the ID3 tags. There are different versions of ID3 tags available. The objective is to read this meta data information from an mp3 file having an ID3v1 tag.

A detailed overview of the ID3v1 (as well as ID3v2 tags) are done here in this post: What are ID3 Tags all about?. A small ID3v1 library is also implemented (reading and writing tags) in C language here: An ID3v1 Tag Parsing Library. TagLib is available to read and write ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags and is free to use.
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phoxis Computer Science, GNU+Linux+FOSS, Overview, Tutorials

What are ID3 Tags all about?


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When you play a music file in your favourite 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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phoxis Coding Discussions, Computer Science

An ID3v1 Tag Parsing Library

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ID3 tag is an mp3 audio media file tagging system. The ID3 tags are stored in a pre-defined location in the mp3 media file, either in the start or at the end (or both). There are two major versions of the ID3 tags. ID3v1 and ID3v2. The tag store data about the song, like track name, album name, artist name, genre, track no, year, composer, licensing information, lyrics, even multiple images inside the tag. To get more information about ID3 tag please check the official website of ID3 tag: http://www.id3.org/, also check this article What are ID3 Tags all about?

Continue reading to get the library

phoxis Coding Discussions, Computer Science

Synchronization Safe Integer

Synchronization safe integers are related to ID3v2 tags. ID3v2 tags has a dynamic structure where the length of the tag is variable and inside the tag, there can stay a lot of frames which again can be of dynamic sizes. The size of the tag is stored in the ID3v2 tag header is of length 4 bytes long. These 4 bytes are stored in a special format which is called a synchronization safe integer. Also from ID3v2.4 tags also the frame size bytes which are stored in the frame headers, describing the frame’s length, are stored as 4 byte synchronization safe integer.

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