README
1MP3info - An MP3 technical info viewer and ID3 1.x tag editor
2
3
4ABOUT
5=====
6
7Q: What's MP3Info?
8
9A: MP3Info is a little utility used to read and modify the ID3 tags of MP3
10files. MP3Info can also display various technical aspects of an MP3 file
11including playing time, bit-rate, sampling frequency and other attributes
12in a pre-defined or user-specifiable output format.
13
14Q: OK, so what's an 'MP3'?
15
16A: For those of you who have been living in a cave for the past decade, an
17MP3 (short for MPEG 1, layer 3) is a very popular digital audio file format
18which encodes an audio file with a lossy compression algorithm resulting in
19files representing a minute of near-CD quality stereo sound in less than a
20megabyte of data. Compare this to non-compressed formats (Windows .WAV files
21for instance) which encode the same minute of audio in about ten megabytes of
22data.
23
24Q: What's an 'ID3 tag'?
25
26A: An ID3 tag is a little scrap of data added to the beginning or end of the
27MP3 file which stores information about the audio recording including the
28title, artist, album, copyright date, and musical genre. ID3 tags are an
29optional feature of the MP3 format, so not all MP3 files have ID3 tags.
30
31
32HISTORY
33=======
34
35MP3Info was originally written by Ricardo Cerqueira <rmc@plug.pt>. Cedric
36Tefft <cedric@phreaker.net> took over maintenance in January 2000 and has been
37the primary maintainer ever since. Over the years a number of patches,
38suggestions and bug reports have been submitted by countless individuals, some
39of whom are credited in the ChangeLog.
40
41
42PORTABILITY
43===========
44
45MP3Info was developed under Linux, but should work on most UN*X variants.
46Included with the text-based version is a GUI version which requires the GTK
47libraries (see http://www.gtk.org). The console version runs in plain
48command-line and interactive curses mode. The curses or ncurses library is
49required.
50
51The command-line version can also be compiled for Windows, but a precompiled
52Windows binary is included in the source distribution and as a
53separate Windows-specific package. There is currently no GUI version for
54Windows.
55
56
57OBTAINING THE LATEST VERSION OF MP3INFO
58=======================================
59
60MP3Info's home is the public library archive at ibiblio.org
61(formerly MetaLab, formerly SunSite). Both source and i386 RPM's
62(for Linux) are available as well as the aforementioned Windows executable.
63
64HOMEPAGE
65
66 http://ibiblio.org/mp3info/
67
68PRIMARY DOWNLOAD
69
70 ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/apps/sound/mp3-utils/mp3info
71 http://ibiblio.org/pub/linux/apps/sound/mp3-utils/mp3info
72
73MIRRORS
74
75 ftp://ftp.freesoftware.com/pub/linux/sunsite/apps/sound/mp3-utils/mp3info/
76 ftp://ftp.twoguys.org/linux/apps/sound/mp3-utils/mp3info/
77
78The entire ibiblio Linux archive (including MP3Info) is mirrored to many other
79locations around the world. A full and current list of ibiblio mirrors can be
80found at http://ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/MIRRORS.html
81
82
83INSTALLATION
84============
85
86See the file 'INSTALL' for build and installation instructions on UNIX platforms.
87See win32\INSTALL-WINDOWS.txt for installation of the Windows binary.
88
89
90Help/Usage/HowTo (Console Version)
91==================================
92MP3Info is fully documented in its manual page. To view the manual page on a
93UNIX platform, simply type 'man mp3info' at any time after installation. If
94you don't have groff installed on your system or for some other reason can't
95read the man page, a text-only version is available in the file mp3info.txt
96
97There is also an HTML version of the manual page included as mp3info.html.
98This is considered the the primary help file for Windows users.
99
100
101Usage: GTK Version
102==================
103
104gmp3info [song.mp3]
105
106
107DISCLAIMER
108==========
109
110I do not take responsibility for damaged files, MP3s or not.
111
112BUGS & CAVEATS
113==============
114
115Known bugs and limitations are detailed in the manual page. If you have any
116bug reports or patches, please email them to me. Bugs get fixed a lot faster
117if you include patches -- especially if the problem is platform specific.
118
119
120TO DO
121=====
122
123* ID3v2 support is the most often-requested feature and is badly needed,
124 however this will entail an almost complete rewrite and I'm a lazy SOB,
125 so it's going to be a while yet... Anybody wanna volunteer?
126
127* Make format specifiers a bit more flexible (allow user to choose
128 int/float/string display arbitrarily and provide some mechanism for
129 convenient magnitude displays of large numbers (KB for kilobytes, MB for
130 megabytes, etc.)
131
132* Add line-editing capabilities to curses version (I have a user-contributed
133 patch, but it's a little broken)
134
135* Make exit codes more useful and document them better (i.e. return 1
136 if no ID3 found, 2 if MP3 is corrupt, 3 if the file wasn't found or
137 something along those lines).
138
139* Add capability to copy ID3 tags from one file to another
140
141* Add -p format specifiers for:
142 * Maximum and minimum bitrates
143 * File index (first file = 0, second file = 1, etc.)
144
145
146
147 - Cedric Tefft <cedric@phreaker.net>
148 November 6, 2006
149
150