Metatag class [APE, ID3v1, ID3v2, Vorbis]

This is a class still under development. At the moment it features fast reading, support for a file of any size (over 4 GB is no problem), full Unicode support for both reading tags and filenames, support for 2.2, 2.3 and 2.4 and possibly a quite inventive access to the frames.

To do:

1. Save files (needs frame conversion between versions 2.2 and 2.3/2.4)
2. CRC-32 validation
3. Private_Unsynchronize function is unfinished
4. Properties for many header & frame flags
5. Support for multipart tags (separate header & footer)
6. Does not currently preserve unknown tags as required by the standard
7. Adding and removing tags
8. More easy access properties

Methods & properties

• Count = number of frames
• FileLoad = opens a file, finds & reads the tag
• FileSave = saves a file (not implemented)
• FrameData = get/set frame's raw data as byte array
• Frames = get a Long array of indexes for a particular frame ID
• FrameText = get/set frame's text (encoding is dealt automatically)
• FrameTextID = get frame's ID as text
• Text = get/set text of a frame of given type (first one found in tag; created if does not exist)
• Version = version number
• VersionText = version as full text

This far testing has been very limited; it would be nice to see this class being read tested on multiple files of different versions. This is also a reason I push out the class early.

I try to give all the base features so that one would only need to care about things such as how to uncompress & show a PNG image, how to uncompress compressed data, how to encrypt if an encrypted frame is found... these are things that may already have a generally used code solution in a project.

I have been analyzing how I should continue with this project. I decided that instead of working with just ID3v2 I should work with much more, since if we count out ID3v2 all the other tag formats are relatively simple.

Thus I've come up with an idea of an easy to use Metatag class that will enable one to save to any of the popular tag formats: ID3v1, ID3v2, APE tag and Vorbis comments. The greatest challenge is to make it easy to save multiple tags to one file, conversion between formats as well as making the tags synced so that each have the same information. To achieve ease of use I will make heavy use of data type conversions so that instead of you needing to parse all the different date formats you'd simply get just one format. Same for string saving, the class will take care automatically on handling string data so that it is readable without conversions.

Full list of planned support for both reading and writing: ID3v1.0, ID3v1.1, ID3v1 enhanced, ID3v2.2, ID3v2.3, ID3v2.4, APEv1, APEv2 & Vorbis1. It will be possible to save multiple tags, but of course there will be some limitations: you can't save all the different tags, and you can't of course mix different versions of the same tag format. I think you can have say ID3v2, ID3v1 and APE in the same file without any problems, but you can't add Vorbis in because it would be technically impossible.


Needless to say, this project will take time.

Did you ever work on this anymore? I would like to use it and maybe finish it if it isn't already.

I could really use this class as well. I have a bunch of MP3 files whose tags TagLibSharp.dll will not read. If you have any updates to this class I could use. If not--do you have any docs? I only need reading of text fields including genre. I'm looking at either trying to debug TagLibSharp (ugh!) or hire someone to do same if I can't get other code. If I get something that works I'm planning to make it open source.