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TagLib

TagLib Audio Meta-Data Library

TagLib is a library for reading and editing the metadata of several popular audio formats. Currently, it supports various metadata containers such as ID3v1, ID3v2 and Vorbis comments for MP3, MP4, AAC, Ogg, Opus, FLAC, Speex, APE, MPC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, TrueAudio, Matroska, WebM, ASF, WMA, DSF, DFF and tracker (MOD, XM, S3M, IT) 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 advanced 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 2.3.1 Release - July 20, 2026

• Matroska: Fix crash when seek head is invalid or missing.
• Matroska: Check element length, support unknown size length, skip invalid elements.
• Matroska: Allow Chapters without a ChapterUID.
• Fix data length indicator check for compressed ID3v2 frames.
• MP4: Use LongLong instead of UInt for cnID atom to support large catalog IDs.
• MP4: Fix destructor and assignment operator for MP4::Chapter.
• MP4: Let hasiXMLData(), hasBEXTData() track on-disk state rather than in-memory state.
• MP4: Support NI STEM atoms with 64-bit length.
• MP4: Enlarge limit number of MP4 atoms at top level.
• MP4: Avoid excessive sample allocations with invalid stsc for QT chapters.
• XM: Correctly save XM tracker files with samples.

Older Releases

Language Bindings

• C (Abstract API only, included with the library.)
• Perl
• Python
  • TagPy
  • pytaglib
• Ruby
  • taglib-ruby
• Rust
  • taglib-rust
• Go
  • go-taglib
• Node
  • node-taglib
• Dart
  • taglib-ffi
• Swift
  • swift-taglib
  • SPFKMetadata

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
ShadowTag	Audio metadata editor for macOS
loudgain	ReplayGain 2.0 loudness normalizer
rsgain	ReplayGain 2.0 loudness normalizer

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 macOS) and Windows using CMake. Most Linux distributions ship with TagLib already.