TagLib
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, APE, ASF, DSF, DFF and AAC 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. Bugs should be reported at the GitHub bug tracker.
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 dependencies) and does provide Glib-style C bindings (currently for the generic API only)
TagLib 2.1 Release - May 31, 2025
- Support for Shorten (SHN) files.
- Compile time configuration of supported formats: WITH_APE, WITH_ASF, …
- Compile time configuration of data and temporary directories for unit tests: TESTS_DIR and TESTS_TMPDIR.
- C bindings: Added taglib_file_new_wchar() and taglib_file_new_type_wchar().
- Preserve unicode encoding when downgrading to ID3v2.3.
- Do not store FLAC metadata blocks which are too large.
- Fix segfaults with String and ByteVector nullptr arguments.
Language Bindings
- C (Abstract API only, included with the library.)
- Perl
- Python
- Ruby
- Rust
- Go
- Node
- Dart
- Swift
Projects Using TagLib
There are hundreds of projects that use TagLib. Here’s a small selection of them:
| VLC Media Player | Multi-purpose media player |
| Kodi | Kodi Media Center |
| Last.fm | Social music site |
| Amazon Kindle | eBook Reader |
| Amazon Music | Music Player and Store |
| Pro Tools | Digital Audio Workstation |
| Native Instruments Traktor | Profesional DJing Software |
| Native Instruments Battery | Drum Sampler |
| Mixxx | DJing Software |
| Izotope RX | Audio Editor |
| Gerbera | UPnP MediaServer |
| Qmmp | Qt-based Multimedia Player (XMMS, Winamp family) |
| Strawberry Music Player | Qt Based Music Player (Fork of Clementine) |
| Goggles Music Manager | Music manager that uses the FOX toolkit |
| GNOME Commander | Two-pane graphical file manager for GNOME |
| Kid3 | Audio Tagger |
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.