Dump audio metadata (album title, track number, etc.) to command line

Question

If I open an audio file with Audacity or Rhythmbox, for example, I can look at the metadata tags such as Artist Name, Track Title, Year, etc. . Is there a convenient way to do this on the command line under Linux?

Solution 1

If it's a standard sort of tag, I believe exiftool should do the trick.

If it doesn't you'd likely need to find something else that dumps the format that audacity uses (apparently info tags).

Solution 2

You can use one of these tools:

mediainfo

Simple program outputting all the basic information from audio files.

exiftool (from package perl-image-exiftool)

This one is more customizable and supports reading and writing meta information in image, audio and video files.

mutagen-inspect (from package mutagen)

Simple frontend to the mutagen audio tagging library for Python.

Solution 3

Try the utility id3info for MP3 files.

Comments

[Rob]

.wav metadata is poorly supported. I'd search for something to edit RIFF INFO if that's possible.

[Joey Adams]

Thanks, but this doesn't print any info for the .wav files I exported from Audacity.

[Renan]

OK, I thought you were talking about .mp3 files. I don't know about metadata in .wav files.

[Jun]

you can run exiftool in the command line as exiftool sample.mp3

[Carlos Pinzón]

mediainfo worked. It can also export to JSON: mediainfo --output=JSON file.mp3