ID3 Tag – Best Command-Line ID3 Tools for macOS

id3-tagmacossoftware-recommendation

Anyone know of a command-line* ID3 tool, with support for ID3v2, that you can get working on Mac OS X with reasonable effort? It should support both reading and writing tags.

(* I want to be able to call it e.g. from some Python scripts, so a GUI tool won't do.)

The id3tool utility is otherwise good, but doesn't support ID3v2 (and thus doesn't play that well with iTunes). I had to compile it from source, but that was pretty straightforward on a Mac with Xcode & developer tools (including, notably, a C compiler). Anyway, I'd especially like something with similar command-line options as id3tool. Here's an example of tagging one file:

id3tool -t "Song Title" -r Artist -a "Album Name" -c 2 track-02.mp3

Best Answer

If you have Homebrew installed (highly recommended), you can just do:

brew install id3lib

This installs several id3 command-line tools, including id3tag, id3convert, id3cp and id3info. No need for python or perl scripting; just use regular shell commands.

Usage: id3tag [OPTIONS]... [FILES]...
   -h         --help            Print help and exit
   -V         --version         Print version and exit
   -1         --v1tag           Render only the id3v1 tag (default=off)
   -2         --v2tag           Render only the id3v2 tag (default=off)
   -aSTRING   --artist=STRING   Set the artist information
   -ASTRING   --album=STRING    Set the album title information
   -sSTRING   --song=STRING     Set the title information
   -cSTRING   --comment=STRING  Set the comment information
   -CSTRING   --desc=STRING     Set the comment description
   -ySTRING   --year=STRING     Set the year
   -tSTRING   --track=STRING    Set the track number
   -TSTRING   --total=STRING    Set the total number of tracks
   -gSHORT    --genre=SHORT     Set the genre
   -w         --warning         Turn on warnings (for debugging) (default=off)
   -n         --notice          Turn on notices (for debugging) (default=off)
Related Question