Welcome to mutagenwrapper’s documentation!

mutagenwrapper is a wrapper for mutagen that normalizes tags between various audio file formats. The normalization is done as in foobar2000, which supports seamless tag management of various audio file formats.

Note that this module is still in its early development stage. Many features are not supported like changing an album art. See Mappings for more details. There may be undocumented limitations too.

You must backup your files if you are going to edit tags and make changes with this module. There is no way to recover files without a backup if something goes wrong.

mutagenwrapper can read tags with multiple values (e.g. multiple artists), but due to the incompatibility of mutagen and foobar2000, the way it saves tags makes them unreadable by foobar2000 in some cases, especially for MP4 files. Hidden tags, if exist, may be lost when you make another change and save tags in foobar2000.

Examples

You can access tags via human-readable names. For the mappings between these names and the actual, internal tag names, see Mappings:

>>> from mutagenwrapper import read_tags
>>> mp3 = read_tags('test.mp3')
>>> mp3['artist']
[u'Holst, Gustav (1874-1934)']
>>> mp3['album']
[u'The Planets']
>>> mp4 = read_tags('test.m4a')
>>> mp4['artist']
[u'Holst, Gustav (1874-1934)']
>>> mp4['album']
[u'The Planets']

You can also get album arts in binary:

>>> mp3['pictures']
['\xff\xd8\xff\xe0\x00\x10JFIF\x00\x01\x01\x01\x01,\x01,...']

Some tags return a single value, not a list. You can use find() to always get a single value even for those tags that returns a list. It will throw a KeyError if there is more than one value. find() returns None for non-existing names, but you can set a default value:

>>> mp4['compilation']
False
>>> mp4.find('compilation')
False
>>> mp4.find('artist')
u'Holst, Gustav (1874-1934)'
>>> mp4.find('date')
>>> mp4.find('date', '1916')
'1916'

Whenever you find the wrapper is not enough, you can access the internal mutagen object:

>>> mp3.raw_tags['TALB']
TALB(encoding=3, text=[u'The Planets'])
>>> mp4.raw_tags['\xa9alb']
[u'The Planets']

Mappings

Tag names in FLAC files are not mapped and the same name is used as the internal name, except for pictures, for which there is no corresponding Vorbis comment (they are stored elsewhere, not as a comment). A blank cell means there is no mapping and values may be hidden by the wrapper (but they are still there and doesn’t get lost when saving) or custom tags can be used.

Custom tags (starting with TXXX: for ID3 and ----:com.apple.iTunes: for MP4) have their name as the internal name without prefix and lowercased, e.g. both TXXX:CUSTOM and ----:com.apple.iTunes:CUSTOM are mapped to custom.

In the current version, pictures, tracknumber, tracktotal, discnumber, and disctotal are read-only. You can read and write other tags.

Name ID3v2 iTunes MP4
album TALB ©alb
albumartist TPE2 aART
albumartistsortorder TSO2 soaa
albumsortorder TSOA soal
artist TPE1 ©ART
artistsortorder TSOP soar
comment   ©cmt
composer TCOM ©wrt
composersortorder TSOC soco
conductor TPE3  
copyright TCOP cprt
date TDRC ©day
discnumber TPOS disk
disctotal TPOS disk
encodedby TENC ©too
genre TCON ©gen
grouping TIT1 ©grp
lyrics TEXT ©lyr
pictures APIC: covr
title TIT2 ©nam
titlesortorder TSOT sonm
tracknumber TRCK trkn
tracktotal TRCK trkn

API reference

mutagenwrapper.read_tags(name, raw=False, format=None)

Returns tags in the audio file as a TagsWrapper, a dictionary-like object with mapped tag keys and values. If raw is True, returns a raw mutagen object with non-mapped keys and values.

Currently it supports FLAC, MP3, iTunes MP4 (.m4a) files. File format is determined by extension, but you can specify it by format (possible values: ‘flac’, ‘mp3’, ‘m4a’).

class mutagenwrapper.TagsWrapper(filename)

A dictionary-like object that wraps the raw mutagen tags. You can access tags via mapped tag keys, like ‘artist’ or ‘album’.

Note that the implementation is rather inefficient. It iterates the internal keys and convert them everytime iterkeys() is called. Since many methods rely on that method, it could be a problem especially when there are many inclusion tests using __contains__() (e.g. 'artist' in mywrapper)

filename

Path of the file

find(key, default=None)

Returns a single value associated with a given key. Raises KeyError if the key is not found or there is no or more than one value.

pprint(raw=False)

Print formatted representation of tags. if raw is True, use keys and values from the underlying mutagen object.

reload()

Reload tags from the file.

save()

Save changes to the file.

Indices and tables

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