How to *completely* wipe an MP3’s metadata

id3mp3

I'm using "beets" to organize my mp3s. One album I bought from Amazon as mp3s is incorrectly marked as NOT a compilation when indeed it IS a compilation. I organize my files differently based on whether or not an album is a compilation. No matter what I attempt to do to these mp3s, the changes I apply to the ID3 tags do not stick.

For example:

mp3info -d ../amazon_album/*  # This WIPES the tags
mp3info ../amazon_album/01-01 - Track 1.mp3 
../amazon_album/01-01 - Track 1.mp3 does not have an ID3 1.x tag.

But then when I open the file in any media player, ALL of the information is still there!

So then I tried:

mp3info -a "LOL" ../amazon_album/*
mp3info  ../amazon_album/01-01 - Track 1.mp3
File: ../amazon_album/01-01 - Track 1.mp3
Title:                                  Track: 
Artist:  LOL
Album:                                  Year:  
Comment:                                Genre:  [255]

Yet, in any media player, it still retains all of the original information. Because of this, I'm not able to change the album to a "Compilation" which means I can't organize it in Beets the way I want.

I've confirmed that it's not a file permissions issue. Am I doing something wrong? Is there another way to accomplish this in Linux? Or is there a way I can "trick" beets into treating it as a compilation (so that it uses my compilation path)?

Best Answer

mp3info only edits the ID3v1 tags, you need to use a program like eyeD3 or id3v2 that supports ID3v2

More comfortable is to use MusicBrainz Picard to tag your MP3 files (uses the mutagen library underneath).

Since mp3info only supports ID3v1, it cannot delete/wipe the ID3v2 info embedded in the MP3 streams.

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