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Is there a command-line program to read tags from .m4a files?

rated 0 times [ 6] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 14073 / 2 Years ago, mon, march 28, 2022, 3:49:53

Running id3v2 -l file.m4a didn't find any tags, but displaying it in rhythmbox did.
Is there another command-line program for working with tags that works on .m4a files?

I'm running precise 12.04.

Note: See Wikipedia's page for .m4a, .mp4, MPEG-4 Part 14 file format background, and note that as discussed at Spec for MP4 and M4A tags - Hydrogenaudio Forums, Apple considers the tags used by iTunes to be proprietary; hence there is no official spec for them available.

This, like other Apple/iTunes polices has caused no end of frustration for users working with audio encoded as AAC!

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bsorbedeldy

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3 Years ago

answered 2 Years ago oileweaty · Accepted Answer

Mutagen

Mutagen is a Python module to handle audio metadata. It supports ASF, FLAC, M4A, Monkey's Audio, MP3, Musepack, Ogg Opus, 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.

There isn't (yet) an Ubuntu package for it, but you can install it via

pip install mutagen

You'll need to install pip if you don't have it already. You can install it using virtualenvwrapper if you want to avoid the need for sudo and avoid possible confusion with the standard Ubuntu package mechanism when it comes to security updates, versions of dependencies etc.

Or you can download and install mutagen manually from here. It's a .tar.gz file (here how to). See also the README file form inside the archive.