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