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 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. 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 1.13 Release - Oct 27, 2022
- Added interface StreamTypeResolver to support streams which cannot be fopen()’ed, e.g. network files.
- Added MP4::File::strip() to remove meta atom from MP4 file.
- Added Map::value() to look up without creating entry.
- Use property “WORK” instead of “CONTENTGROUP” for ID3v2 “TIT1” frame, use property “WORK” for ASF “WM/ContentGroupDescription”, use property “COMPILATION” for ID3v2 “TCMP” frame.
- Build system improvements: option WITH_ZLIB, BUILD_TESTING instead of BUILD_TESTS, GNUInstallDirs, FeatureSummary, tests with BUILD_SHARED_LIBS, cross compilation with Buildroot, systems without HAVE_GCC_ATOMIC, Clang.
- Fixed heap-buffer-overflows when handling ASF, APE, FLAC, ID3v2, MP4, MPC tags.
- Fixed detection of invalid file by extension when correct type can be detected by contents.
- Fixed unnecessary creation of map entries in APE and FLAC tags if looked up tag does not exist.
- Fixed parsing of MP4 non-full meta atoms.
- Fixed potential ID3v1 false positive in the presence of an APE tag.
- Fixed ID3v2 version handling for frames embedded in CHAP or CTOC frames.
- Fixed parsing of multiple strings with a single BOM in ID3v2.4.0.
- Fixed several smaller issues reported by clang-tidy.
Language Bindings
- C (Abstract API only, included with the library.)
- Perl
- Python
- Ruby
- taglib-ruby
- rtaglib (Abstract API only)
- ruby-taglib (alternative, older) (Abstract API only)
Projects Using TagLib
There are hundreds of projects that use TagLib. Here’s a small selection of them:
| JuK | Jukebox for KDE |
| Amarok | Music player for KDE |
| Clementine | Multi-platform player inspired by Amarok 1.4 |
| Last.fm | Social music site |
| Amazon Kindle | eBook Reader |
| Native Instruments Traktor | Profesional DJing Software |
| VLC Media Player | Multi-purpose media player |
| Kodi | Kodi Media Center |
| Gerbera | UPnP MediaServer |
| Audiobox.fm | Cloud-based media library and player |
| Audacious Media Player | GTK2 Based Music Player (XMMS, BMP family) |
| Quick File Rename | Shareware, meta-data aware batch file renamer for Windows |
| Goggles Music Manager | Music manager that uses the FOX toolkit |
| GNOME Commander | Two-pane graphical file manager for GNOME |
| Loudgain | Loudness normalizer |
| 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.