Audio file metadata?

On the command line, you might try ffmpeg. I found this example which will probably also work for ogg:

ffmpeg -hide_banner -loglevel warning -i input.mp3 -metadata title="The Title You Want" -metadata artist="The Artist" -metadata album="Name of the Album" -c:a copy output.mp3

The "-c:a copy" part instructs ffmpeg to make a direct copy instead of transcoding the file using some default audio encoder settings. Both that and the metadata options must go inbetween the input and output file names. See "man ffmpeg".

Other programs I found support only mp3, have not been updated in a decade or are rather convoluted, using their own database as an intermediate step (update tags in the db, write out to files).

Sounds like you want an ID3 tag editor, e.g.

Presume at least some of these are available on rPi?

Yes, this will work on pretty much any container format you'll now meet except for mpc (which approximately nobody uses any more, and a good thing too).

If you want to _read_ metadata, perhaps to edit them elsewhere before writing them back:

ffprobe -hide_banner -show_format -print_format json [filename]

may be your friend.

Best one I've found is kid3 - kid3-qt and kid3-cli It's in the apt repository.

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Chris Elvidge, England

I generally use easytag whenever I need to edit tags on music files. Its a graphical program that edits tags in music files: that's all it does. It works well under Fedora/XFCE and is available for Raspbian. Understands ogg, though I usually use it for MP3 and FLAC.

May be slight overkill for dealing with individual tracks: it works really well when dealing with albums and other collections of track files which have one or more tags in common, e.g. artist, composer, album title.

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Martin    | martin at 
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

Thanks, everyone, for the suggestions. Seems there are several good choices. I'll probably go with ffmpeg for now, as I don't have to install anything, and it's only the occasional typo I want to correct. As I'm editing the audio with Audacity, the original text gets added there.

While I'm here, I have another question... I play back the files several ways, but I was amused/startled/slightly-horrified that when I use vlc, it pops up an image of an album cover for many of the files! What is it using to find that? Some of the metadata I added, I suppose. Must be going to the cloud...

-- Pete --

Yup, it'll search on metadata if you let it; there are various services that offer lookups along these lines.

One player I use on Android insists on tagging anything from The Esoteric Order of Roleplayers with this chap:

so one can't really regard it as _reliable_.

The cover art may be embedded in the actual media file, essentially it is another form of tag. I know easytag allows art to be added, not familarvwith the other options. It isn't looking them anywhere, nor is it unique, my phone and even my TV do exactly the same thing if the art is there in the first place.

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Andrew Smallshaw 
andrews@sdf.org

Not in this case... unless somehow the image was imbedded in an ancient

45! (:-)) These are all files I've digitized directly from the original vinyl. The tags are ones I added myself, not always even exactly what's on the label.

-- Pete --

There may be a tag for cover art but AFAIK its not supported by Easytag.

EasyTag doesn't care if you lob a suitable sized image into thre same directory ad the track files its happy to ignore it and LMS is quite happy to display .JPG or .PNG images on the relevant wab pages, just as my old Touch is happy to display them on its screen. The file used to have to be called 'folder.jpg' but I think it'll accept any name now.

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Martin    | martin at 
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

It's a setting: look up track info/album art online, yes or no. Often it gets the right info just by looking at a directory with a certain number of tracks of a certain length. (And by going online, submitting that info and getting something relevant back from the database.) Most widely used, I think:

On a sunny day (Tue, 26 May 2020 21:43:16 -0000 (UTC)) it happened Roger Bell_West wrote in :

If it is only a tIping error I can easily change things like typos with 'hexedit' # hexedit hcam_1_890.ts

Use tab to go to alphanum side overwrite save

hexedit file.ts

00000000 47 40 11 10 00 42 F0 28 00 01 C1 00 00 FF 01 FF 00 01 FC 80 17 48 15 01 06 46 46 6D 70 65 67 0C 52 54 53 50 20 53 65 73 73 69 6F 6E B5 B3 2A 58 G@...B.(.............H...FFmpeg.RTSP Session..*X 00000030 FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF ................................................ 00000060 FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF ................................................ 00000090 FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF 47 40 00 10 ............................................G@.. 000000C0 00 00 B0 0D 00 01 C1 00 00 00 01 F0 00 2A B1 04 B2 FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF .............*.................................. 000000F0 FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF ................................................ 00000120 FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF ................................................ 00000150 FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF 47 50 00 10 00 02 B0 17 ........................................GP...... 00000180 00 01 C1 00 00 E1 00 F0 00 1B E1 00 F0 00 06 E1 01 F0 00 27 A0 D9 10 FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF ...................'............................

You can even do it with joe text editor.

I have/use Easytag 2.1.7 for mass renaming/mp3 tag editing and it does indeed support embedded pictures in mp3s -- it's on the next tab across from "Common" tags, and marked "Pictures". You can add or remove pictures from the file, or save out a copy of the embedded pic.

If you use the "Pictures" tab option to do so, it will not ignore it, it will embed it in the file, then every player that supports this stuff will see it (hopefully!)

As to the OP -- I also use "id3v2" for command line dumping/manipulating of metadata in audio files.

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--------------------------------------+------------------------------------ 
Mike Brown: mjb[-at-]signal11.org.uk  |    http://www.signal11.org.uk

Sure, but thats at the track level - I just checked to make sure.

However, I thought the OP was asking about album art.

This is fine which is fine for BBC Radio programs and other long recordings ("cabin Pressure", Radio 3 Concerts of sound-desk recordings of whole sets), but would be decidedly painful if you rip CDs at the track level, because:

(a) very few, if any, albums have a different image for each track

(b) putting the same image in every track does little but chew up masses of disk space if you like high resolution images.

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Martin    | martin at 
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

Ahh, yes I found the setting in VLC preferences. Now set to "Manual".

I don't see how it can be using CDDB or kin, though, from the description in WP. The ID seems to be formed by the length and order of tracks in an album, but my files are all single tracks, and probably only approximately the length of the original as I usually put a brief silence before and after. I rather hope it's not using a Shazam type audio signature derived from the track itself!

Veering a bit off-topic, I listen a lot to Radio Caroline and its Flashback (again usually via the Pi) and they both use the 'ACRCloud' service to provide a playlist of their tracks. This often staggers me completely with its ability to accurately name the most obscure song and then, equally strangely, to quite fail to identify the most familiar one! (It does use a signature derived from the first few seconds of audio.)

-- Pete --

Correct, the orig question was about editing the metadata in an Ogg/Vorbis file (not an Ogg/Vorbis *album* ;) and the later observation was that VLC was popping a picture when listening to some of the *tracks*.

True. All I can say is that where a number of MP3 tracks of individual songs from an album exhibit this behaviour in VLC, it's because the album cover is embedded in each one.

No need for a different image for each track, although that would be possible.

True, but since when was efficiency a thing any more?

The image that VLC is showing me for .mp3 files are the same images shown in Easytag, and those images are embedded as metadata in each individual mp3 file.

Yeah, I could strip them out to save some disc space, but I don't bother.

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--------------------------------------+------------------------------------ 
Mike Brown: mjb[-at-]signal11.org.uk  |    http://www.signal11.org.uk

So, to close this out...

To satisfy my curiosity, in the end I did some tcpdumping, and found that vlc is querying 'mb.videolan.org' (aka goldeneye.videolan.org) for the data. The query it sends uses the 'Artist' and 'Title' tags I supplied when I created the file. The answers seem to come back from musicbrainz.org.`

Which means it's all open-source stuff, And I was chuffed to see that the html headers videolan returns all include good old "X-Clacks-Overhead: GNU Terry Pratchett" (:-))

-- Pete --

Ah, I see why my VLC has never done that to me (it only shows artwork physically embedded in the mp3 as metadata) :-

Tools/Preferences/Interface

"Privacy/Network Interaction"/Album Art Download Policy

[x] "Manual Download Only" [ ] "When track starts playing" [ ] "As soon as track is added"

Either I switched that off on first install, or the default was "don't do that".

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--------------------------------------+------------------------------------ 
Mike Brown: mjb[-at-]signal11.org.uk  |    http://www.signal11.org.uk

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Cheers, 
Chris.