This is only my porting effort from 2012/2013, please refer to https://bitbucket.org/lazka/mutagen/ for the currently developed library
Mutagen is a Python module to handle audio metadata. It supports ASF, FLAC, M4A, Monkey's Audio, MP3, Musepack, Ogg FLAC, Ogg Speex, Ogg Theora, Ogg Vorbis, True Audio, WavPack and OptimFROG audio files. All versions of ID3v2 are supported, and all standard ID3v2.4 frames are parsed. It can read Xing headers to accurately calculate the bitrate and length of MP3s. ID3 and APEv2 tags can be edited regardless of audio format. It can also manipulate Ogg streams on an individual packet/page level.
Mutagen works on Python 2.3+ and has no dependencies outside the CPython standard library.
$ ./setup.py build $ su -c "./setup.py install"
The primary documentation for Mutagen is the doc strings found in the source code. $ pydoc mutagen $ pydoc mutagen.
The tools/ directory contains several useful examples, and there is a brief tutorial in TUTORIAL.
The API-NOTES file lists parts of the API that are either unstable or will be removed in the future.
To test Mutagen's MP3 reading support, run $ tools/mutagen-pony Mutagen will try to load all of them, and report any errors.
To look at the tags in files, run $ tools/mutagen-inspect filename ...
To run our test suite, $ ./setup.py test
Mutagen writes ID3v2.4 tags which id3lib cannot read. If you enable ID3v1 tag saving (pass v1=2 to ID3.save), id3lib will read those.
iTunes has a bug in its handling of very large ID3 tags (such as tags that contain an attached picture). Mutagen can read tags from iTunes, but iTunes may not be able to read tags written by Quod Libet.
Mutagen has had several bugs in correct sync-safe parsing and writing of data length flags in ID3 tags. This will only affect files with very large or compressed ID3 frames (e.g. APIC). As of 1.10 we believe them all to be fixed.
Prior to 1.10.1, Mutagen wrote an incorrect flag for APEv2 tags that claimed they did not have footers. This has been fixed, however it means that all APEv2 tags written before 1.10.1 are corrupt.
Prior to 1.16, the MP4 cover atom used a .format attribute to indicate the image format (JPEG/PNG). Python 2.6 added a str.format method which conflicts with this. 1.17 provides .imageformat when running on any version, and still provides .format when running on a version before 2.6.
Mutagen 1.18 moved EasyID3FileType to mutagen.easyid3, rather than mutagen.id3, which was used in 1.17. Keeping in mutagen.id3 caused circular import problems. To import EasyID3FileType correctly in 1.17 and 1.18 or later:
import mutagen.id3
try:
from mutagen.easyid3 import EasyID3FileType
except ImportError:
# Mutagen 1.17.
from mutagen.id3 import EasyID3FileType
Mutagen 1.19 made it possible for POPM to have no 'count' attribute. Previously, files that generated POPM frames of this type would fail to load at all.
When given date frames less than four characters long (which are already outside the ID3v2 specification), Mutagen 1.20 and earlier would write invalid ID3v1 tags that were too short. Mutagen 1.21 will parse these and fix them if it finds them while saving.