An MP3 metadata viewer for every common format
Audio files describe themselves in tags: song title, artist, album, track number, year, genre, comments and cover art. They also record technical facts such as bitrate and sample rate. This MP3 metadata viewer reads all of it and shows it in readable tables, along with a player to check you have the right file. Besides MP3 it reads FLAC, M4A and AAC, Ogg Vorbis, Opus, WAV, AIFF, WMA and several other formats.
Where the tags live
| Format | Tag system | Example field |
|---|---|---|
| MP3 | ID3v2 (and the old ID3v1 at the end of the file) | TIT2 title, TPE1 artist, APIC picture |
| FLAC, Ogg, Opus | Vorbis comments | TITLE, ARTIST |
| M4A, AAC | MP4 metadata atoms | ©nam, ©ART, covr |
| WAV | RIFF INFO chunk or ID3 | INAM, IART |
The Tags table shows the common fields with plain names whatever the format. The raw frames sections list every tag exactly as stored, which is useful when a tagging program wrote something unexpected or a player shows the wrong value.
ID3v1 and ID3v2
MP3 files can carry two kinds of ID3 tag. ID3v1 is a fixed 128-byte block at the end of the file with room for 30 characters per field and no pictures. ID3v2, used by current software, sits at the start, allows text of any length in any language, and stores cover art, lyrics and many other fields. Versions 2.3 and 2.4 are the common ones. When a file has both, the viewer shows each in its own section.
Technical details
The format section shows the container and codec, duration, bitrate, sample rate, bit depth, number of channels and whether the audio is lossless. For MP3, the bitrate tells you the quality the file was encoded at, for example 128 or 320 kbps. A "320 kbps" file converted from a 128 kbps source will not sound better than the source, so the encoder field can help you spot such files.
Cover art
Embedded pictures are shown with their type, such as front cover or artist, and can be downloaded as image files.
Related tools: view photo metadata with the EXIF viewer, check what an unknown file is with the file type checker, or encode audio for embedding with MP3 to Base64.