TagLib
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API Documentation
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TagLib Audio Meta-Data Library
TagLib is a library for reading and editing the meta-data of several popular audio formats. Currently it supports both ID3v1 and ID3v2 for MP3 files, Ogg Vorbis comments and ID3 tags and Vorbis comments in FLAC, MPC, Speex, WavPack and TrueAudio files.
TagLib is distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) and Mozilla Public License (MPL). Essentially that means that it may be used in proprietary applications, but if changes are made to TagLib they must be contributed back to the project. Please review the licenses if you are considering using TagLib in your project.
There is some general information about the motivation and workings of TagLib that can be found in the API documentation.
Contact:
Please, for all questions related to TagLib and / or patches use the development list rather than my personal address!
Goals and Features:
- TagLib is fast - tests have shown it to be about 6 times faster than id3lib and 3 times faster than libvorbisfile at reading tags (CPU time)
- TagLib is clean - TagLib is written in clean, object oriented C++ using a programming style common in KDE and Qt library programming
- TagLib is easy - TagLib offers an abstraction layer that makes it easy to ignore the differences between the different file formats and their implementations
- TagLib is powerful - for those that want to look under the hood TagLib provides access to the implementations of the individual file formats and provides a toolkit for doing advance manipulation of audio meta-data
- TagLib is well documented - Every class, namespace, function and enumeration in TagLib is documented
- TagLib supports Unicode - both ID3v2 and Ogg Vorbis standards are designed to support Unicode, so is TagLib (many tagging libraries and frontends are not)
- TagLib is extensible - TagLib does not implement every feature of ID3v2, but does instead make it possible for application authors to extend TagLib to support the specific features that they need in their applications
- TagLib is not toolkit specific - while TagLib does use KDE-style programming conventions and C++ by default, it does not link to either Qt or Glib (in fact it has no external dependancies) and does provide Glib-style C bindings (currently for the generic API only)
TagLib 1.6.1 Release - October 31, 2009
Bugfix release only
TagLib 1.6 Release - September 13, 2009
Changes from 1.5 to 1.6
- New CMake option to build a static version - ENABLE_STATIC.
- Added support for disabling dllimport/dllexport on Windows using the TAGLIB_STATIC macro.
- Support for parsing the obsolete 'gnre' MP4 atom.
- New cpp macros TAGLIB_WITH_MP4 and TAGLIB_WITH_ASF to determin if TagLib was built with MP4/ASF support.
- Split Ogg packets larger than 64k into multiple pages.
- TagLib can now use FLAC padding block.
- ID3v2.2 frames are now not incorrectly saved.
- Support for ID3v2.2 PIC frames.
- Fixed a bug in ByteVectorList::split().
- XiphComment::year() now falls back to YEAR if DATE doesn't exist and XiphComment::year() falls back to TRACKNUM if TRACKNUMBER doesn't exist.
- Improved ID3v2.3 genre parsing.
- Better checking of corrupted ID3v2 APIC data.
- Bitrate calculating using the Xing header now uses floating point numbers.
- New TagLib::String method rfind().
- Added support for MP4 file format with iTunes-style metadata
- Added support for ASF (WMA) file format.
- Fixed crash when saving a Locator APEv2 tag.
- Fixed a possible crash in the non-const version of String::operator[] and in String::operator+=.
- Added support for PRIV ID3v2 frames.
- Empty ID3v2 genres are no longer treated as numeric ID3v1 genres.
- Added support for the POPM (rating/playcount) ID3v2 frame.
- Generic RIFF file format support:
- Support for AIFF files with ID3v2 tags.
- Support for WAV files with ID3v2 tags.
- Fixed crash on handling unsupported ID3v2 frames, e.g. on encrypted frames.
- Fixed overflow while calculating bitrate of FLAC files with a very high bitrate.
Language Bindings
- C (Abstract API only, included with the library.)
- Perl
- Python
- Ruby (Abstract API only)
- Ruby (alternative, older) (Abstract API only)
Projects Using TagLib
There are quite a few projects using TagLib already. Here's a partial list. If you know of something else, please send me a mail with a link and I'll add it here. (Note that inclusion here is not an endorsement of the listed software.)
| JuK | Jukebox for KDE |
| Amarok | Music player for KDE |
| Last.fm | Social music site |
| Songbird | Mozilla powered open music player |
| Native Instruments Traktor | Profesionall DJing Software |
| VLC Media Player | Multi-purpose media player |
| MusicCube | Cross Platform Jukebox |
| Madman | Music Manager |
| IMMS | Intelligent Multimedia Management System |
| MPEG Menu System Version2 | Multimedia Playback Menu System |
| KTag | KDE Based Tagging Application |
| K-Yamo | Tagger and music organizer for KDE |
| Prokyon3 | Multiplatform music manager |
| Tellico | Collection manager for KDE |
| Audacious Media Player | GTK2 Based Music Player (XMMS, BMP family) |
| Sonata | GTK+ based music client for MPD |
| Quick File Rename | Shareware, meta-data aware batch file renamer for Windows |
| Goggles Music Manager | Music manager that uses the FOX toolkit |
| Gnomad 2 | Music manager for the Creative NOMAD, Creative Zen and Dell DJ MP3 players |
| GNOME Commander | Two-pane graphical file manager for GNOME |
| Rutaci | Command line music tagger written in ruby |
SVN Access
While TagLib doesn't directly use anything KDE related it is largely developed by KDE developers. As such it's hosted in the "kde-support" module of KDE's SVN repository. You can check get a copy via anonymous SVN with:
svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/kdesupport/taglibThere's more information and mirrors listed at the KDE Developer's Corner.
Microsoft Windows
As of version 1.5 TagLib is officially supported under Microsoft Windows. TagLib may be build from source using the CMake build system on Windows. There are also binaries available here.
Apple OS X
A Mac OS X (Universal) framework is available here.
Most Linux and UNIX distributions include TagLib. The source may be build using the standard configure and make commands.