MP3Info

Get It!

The current version of MP3Info is 0.8.5a -- released November 14, 2006. This is primarily a bug fix release relative to version 0.8.4. Check out the Change Log to see what's new. I apologize to all you fine folks out there who have contributed patches and suggestions that haven't been integrated yet. Adding ID3V2 support is, unfortunately, monopolizing most of my development time.

    Source: mp3info-0.8.5a.tgz
    Binary (Red Hat/Fedora Linux - i386): mp3info-0.8.5a-1.i386.rpm
    Binary (Windows): mp3info-0.8.5-win.zip Why isn't this version 0.8.5a? Because the only difference between 0.8.5 and 0.8.5a does not affect the Windows version.

For the protocol challenged, MP3Info is also available via HTTP

Current and previous versions are available here.

About MP3Info

MP3Info is a little utility used to read and modify the ID3 tags of MP3 files. MP3Info can also display various techincal aspects of an MP3 file including playing time, bit-rate, sampling frequency and other attributes in a pre-defined or user-specifiable output format.

Q: OK, so what's an 'MP3'?

A: For those of you who have been living in a cave for the past decade, an MP3 (short for MPEG-1, audio layer 3) is a very popular digital audio file format which encodes an audio file with a lossy compression algorithm resulting in files representing a minute of near-CD quality stereo sound in less than a megabyte of data. Compare this to non-compressed formats (Windows .WAV files for instance) which encode the same minute of audio in about ten megabytes of data.

Q: What's an 'ID3 tag'?

A: An ID3 tag is a little scrap of data added to the beginning or end of the MP3 file which stores information about the audio recording including the title, artist, album, copyright date, and musical genre. ID3 tags are an optional feature of the MP3 format, so not all MP3 files have ID3 tags.

History

MP3Info was originally written by Ricardo Cerqueira. Cedric Tefft took over maintenance in January 2000 and has been the primary maintainer ever since. Over the years a number of patches, suggestions and bug reports have been submitted by countless individuals, some of whom are credited in the ChangeLog.

Portability

MP3Info was developed under Linux, but should work on most UN*X variants. Included with the text-based version is a GUI version (click here for a screenshot) which requires the GTK2 libraries. The console version runs in plain command-line and interactive curses mode. The curses or ncurses library is required for interactive mode.

A pre-compiled Windows version is available (see above).

Obtaining the latest version of MP3Info

MP3Info's home is the public library archive ibiblio.org (formerly MetaLab, formerly SunSite).

Primary download

   ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/apps/sound/mp3-utils/mp3info
   http://ibiblio.org/pub/linux/apps/sound/mp3-utils/mp3info

Mirrors

The entire ibiblio Linux archive (including MP3Info) is mirrored to many other locations around the world. A full and current list of ibiblio mirrors can be found at http://ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/MIRRORS.html

Installation

See the INSTALL file.

Usage

A detailed UNIX manual page complete with examples is included with package.

Other Programs Called 'MP3Info'

Several people have pointed out that there are other, older programs out there called mp3info. To date, I have found only one: authored by Thorvald Natvig <thorvald@natvig.com> You used to be able to get it at ftp://bimbo.hive.no/pub/mp3info, but as of November 2006 that link seems to be dead any I haven't been able to locate a new one.

Note! Thorvald's version uses different command-line switches than this version. I have had reports of people accidentally changing the ID3 tags of their MP3 files as a result of "upgrading" from Thorvald's version to mine without realizing they were completely different programs with different command-line switches. Please be aware of which mp3info you are using. Check the usage syntax. The two versions are not interchangeable.

Translations

Andrea Nicaretta <yzitlover@yahoo.com> has translated some of MP3Info's documentation into Italian.

Scripts

User-contributed scripts are posted here only as a courtesy. I do not support them in any way. Please direct all questions, comments and support issues to the respective authors.

Dan Kegel <dank@kegel.com> has provided an example perl script which utilizes mp3info to rename MP3 files.

dual's <info@dualisanoob.com> perl script generates an M3U file (a Winamp-style playlist) from a directory of MP3 files.

Disclaimer

I do not take responsibility for damaged files, MP3s or not.

To Do

• ID3v2 support is the most often-requested feature and is badly needed, however this will entail an almost complete rewrite and I'm a lazy SOB, so it's going to be a while yet... Anybody wanna volunteer?
• Make format specifiers a bit more flexible (allow user to choose int/float/string display arbitrarily and provide some mechanism for convenient magnitude displays of large numbers (KB for kilobytes, MB for megabytes, etc.)
• Add line-editing capabilities to curses version (I have a user-contributed patch, but it's a little broken)
• Make exit codes more useful and document them better (i.e. return 1 if no ID3 found, 2 if MP3 is corrupt, 3 if the file wasn't found or something along those lines).
• Add capability to copy ID3 tags from one file to another
• Add -p format specifiers for:
  • Maximum and minimum bitrates
  • File index (first file = 0, second file = 1, etc.)

- Cedric Tefft