TagLib
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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 TrueAudio, WAV, AIFF, MP4 and ASF 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 1.7 Release - March 12, 2011
- Support for reading/writing tags from Monkey’s Audio files.
- Support for reading/writing embedded pictures from WMA files.
- Support for reading/writing embedded pictures from FLAC files
- Implemented
APE::Tag::isEmpty()to check for all APE tags, not just the basic ones. - Added reading of WAV audio length.
- Exposed FLAC MD5 signature of the uncompressed audio stream via
FLAC::Properties::signature(). - Added function
ByteVector::toHex()for hex-encoding of byte vectors. - WavPack reader now tries to get the audio length by finding the final block, if the header doesn't have the information.
- Fixed a memory leak in the ID3v2.2 PIC frame parser.
- Fixed writing of RIFF files with even chunk sizes.
- Fixed compilation on MSVC 2010.
- Removed support for building using autoconf/automake.
- API docs can be now built using "make docs".
- Fixed bitrate calculation for WAV files.
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 |
| Amazon Kindle | eBook reader |
| Songbird | Mozilla powered open music player |
| Native Instruments Traktor | Profesionall DJing Software |
| VLC Media Player | Multi-purpose media player |
| Audiobox.fm | Cloud-based media library and player |
| IMMS | Intelligent Multimedia Management System |
| K-Yamo | Tagger and music organizer for KDE |
| Tellico | Collection manager for KDE |
| 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 |
Git Access
TagLib is hosted on GitHub. You can check out TagLib's development source there.
Building
TagLib can be built on various UNIXes (including OS X) and Windows using CMake. Most Linux distributions ship with TagLib already.