Command line tool to write flac, ogg vorbis and mp3 id3v2 meta data?

Question

Is there any command line tool that can write all three formats/containers? I've already searched but could not find anything that does the job.

So far I'm using vorbiscomment, metaflac and id3tool and I really would like to replace them by a single tool if possible.

If there is no tool than can write them all, is there at least any suggestion to replace id3tool with something that can write id3v2 (v2.4) tags at least?

I'm not looking for a tagger but for a tool that will allow me to write meta data by a script to the different audio files. My current status is that I have a script that uses the three tools (vorbiscomment, metaflac and id3tool) but then i realized that id3tool can not write id3v2 tags... I'm creating automatically these 3 audio formats from a wav master and need to be able to automate the meta data writing to these files.

score 10 · Accepted Answer · edited Jul 13 '20 at 07:45

10

Surprisingly I found a good solution after a month: FFmpeg.

ffmpeg -i out.mp3 -metadata title="The Title You Want" -metadata artist="" -metadata album="Name of the Album" -c:a copy out2.mp3

See the complete article here: How To: Create/Write ID3 tags using ffmpeg

It is even working with UTF8 data and foreign characters.

edited Jul 13 '20 at 07:45

ckujau

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answered Nov 14 '12 at 09:20

floriank

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You should also use an option such as `-c:a copy` before the output file is specified so that ffmpeg copies the stream rather than re-encoding it, otherwise you lose quality. – realgeek Jul 07 '16 at 15:09
This shrunk all my mp3s to 3 seconds.... ffmpeg gave an error "[mp3 @ 0x7f975a800000] Estimating duration from bitrate, this may be inaccurate" – Alec Jacobson Oct 26 '20 at 13:07

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited Aug 05 '13 at 05:29

libsndfile will do all that ffmpeg does and much more elegantly.

For example, when you run $ sndfile-metadata-set --help, you can see the usage:

  sndfile-metadata-set [options] <file>
  sndfile-metadata-set [options] <input file> <output file>

Where an option is made up of a pair of a field to set (one of
the 'bext' or metadata fields below) and a string. Fields are
as follows :

    --bext-description       Set the 'bext' description.
    --bext-originator        Set the 'bext' originator.
    --bext-orig-ref          Set the 'bext' originator reference.
    --bext-umid              Set the 'bext' UMID.
    --bext-orig-date         Set the 'bext' origination date.
    --bext-orig-time         Set the 'bext' origination time.
    --bext-coding-hist       Set the 'bext' coding history.
    --bext-time-raf          Set the 'bext' Time ref.

    --str-comment            Set the metadata comment.
    --str-title              Set the metadata title.
    --str-copyright          Set the metadata copyright.
    --str-artist             Set the metadata artist.
    --str-date               Set the metadata date.
    --str-album              Set the metadata album.
    --str-license            Set the metadata license.

There are also the following arguments which do not take a
parameter :

    --bext-auto-time-date    Set the 'bext' time and date to current time/date.
    --bext-auto-time         Set the 'bext' time to current time.
    --bext-auto-date         Set the 'bext' date to current date.
    --str-auto-date          Set the metadata date to current date.

Most of the above operations can be done in-place on an existing file. If any operation cannot be performed, the application will exit with an appropriate error message.

Using libsndfile-1.0.25.

sndfile-metadata-set apparently does not support writing either Flac or Ogg files: "Error : Not able to open input file '01_The_Fox.ogg' : Error : This file format does not support read/write mode." — slinkp, Apr 08 '14 at 15:40
In Ubuntu the package is now called "sndfile-programs" with the executable "sndfile-metadata-set". — Per Christian Henden, Aug 23 '20 at 07:42
"failed : File contains data in an unknown format." for mp3s... — Alec Jacobson, Oct 26 '20 at 13:09

milahu · Answer 3 · 2023-01-20T11:55:45.337

tagutil is a lightweight CLI-tool to read/write audio tags

Backends:
   libvorbis: Ogg/Vorbis files format
      TagLib: various file format but limited set of tags

example use in bash script:

#! /usr/bin/env bash
# tagutil demo: fix title
# license: public domain, no warranty

set -e

# check dependencies
for dep in tagutil jq
do
  command -v $dep || { echo please install $dep; exit 1; }
done

dryrun=false
if [[ "$1" == "-n" ]]
then
  dryrun=true
  shift
fi

for file in "$@"
do

  echo "file: $file"

  # read title
  title=$(tagutil -F json print "$file" | jq -r ".[0].title")
  title1="$title" # copy
  echo "title 1: $title"

  # fix title
  title=$(echo $title) # collapse multiple whitespaces
  title=$(echo "$title" | sed 's/ (original version)$//i') # remove suffix
  title=$(echo "$title" | sed 's/ (album version)$//i') # remove suffix
  title=$(echo "$title" | sed 's/ (official video)$//i') # remove suffix

  if [[ "$title1" == "$title" ]]
  then
    echo no change
    continue
  fi

  echo "title 2: $title"

  drycmd=()
  $dryrun && drycmd=(printf "%q ")

  # make backup
  #[ -e "$file.bak" ] || cp -v "$file" "$file.bak"

  # write title
  ${drycmd[@]} tagutil set:title="$title" "$file"

done

score 0 · Answer 4 · edited Dec 29 '19 at 15:45

0

omptagger provides a unified interface for tagging all three of your requested file formats.

edited Dec 29 '19 at 15:45

mivk

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answered Apr 11 '12 at 00:51

ephemient

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I'm not looking for a tagger. Refining my questions but thanks for making clear that there are taggers which I do not want. ;) – floriank Apr 11 '12 at 00:57
@burzum I'm not sure I understand the distinction? You can write individual tags with `omptagger -s name=value file`. – ephemient Apr 11 '12 at 01:00
Ok, the notes made me think this is not possible, I'll have to check this out tomorrow it's late here and I have linux just in a VM running. If there would be a windows binary it would be perfect because it is my primary development OS. I'm going to review this tool and mark your answer as correct if it works out for me. – floriank Apr 11 '12 at 01:12

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Apr 11 '12 at 05:15

0

This works for me:

http://id3v2.sourceforge.net/

It's available in the Debian repo's, if that's relevant.

-- wait, is that an example of a 'tagger', which is what you're not looking for? I'm afraid I don't quite understand your question then..

answered Apr 11 '12 at 05:15

rkv

1

There a programs, "Taggers", that just rename files based on given data or just read the file name as string and write the data from there into the meta data of the file. My files are simply uuids without extensions and empty meta data. I need something that will just write meta data into the files. Going to check also this tool. – floriank Apr 11 '12 at 08:37
1

Like id3tag, which comes with id3lib, it seems to jumble up most non-ASCII characters though. – Lri Jul 14 '12 at 18:09
You might prefer [mid3v2](https://linux.die.net/man/1/mid3v2) to id3v2. On Debian-based systems it can be installed with `apt install python-mutagen`. But that is only for mp3 files, so not the multi-format solution the OP is looking for. – mivk Dec 29 '19 at 15:56
The mutagen command line utilities unfortunately corrupt ogg files because they blindly prepend an id3 tag, which is not valid for ogg files. – Remember Monica Nov 12 '22 at 19:02

Command line tool to write flac, ogg vorbis and mp3 id3v2 meta data?

5 Answers5