gst-id3v23-tags 0.0.1

gst-id3v23-tags application provides a gstreamer plugin that adds metadata to media files (mainly MP3 audio files) with ID3 version 2.3.0 tags. This information includes elements such as the tracks title, author, performing artist, etc.

Other gstreamer taggers either create ID3 1.0 tags, which have significant limitations, or ID3 2.4 tags, which are not understood by as many MP3 players as ID3 2.3.

The gstreamer framework provides already some ID3 taggers, at least two of them one that encodes the in the version 1.0 and the other in the 2.4. Today most software and hardware mp3 players are able to understand at least one of the two formats. The problem is that not all MP3 players (specially the hardware ones) are able to understand ID3 v2.4 tags and using ID3 v1.0 can have some limitations specially with tags that contain UNICODE characters. Its most likely that today a decent MP3 player will be able to understand ID3 v2.3 tags.

This plugin was written in order to provide an alternative to MP3 players that can understand only ID3 v2.3 tags. This plugin should provide a nicer alternative to the end user over the two existing plugin in the gstreamer framework.

The ID3 v2.3 encoding is actually performed through the library id3lib which is available at http://www.id3lib.org/. The plugin it self depends only on the gstreamer framework (version 0.10) and the library id3lib (version 3.8.3).

To compile do:

make plugin

To install the plugin into your home account (no need to be root) just do:

make install

To use the plugin, just include the element id3v23 in any gstreamer pipeline. Heres an example on how to retag an old MP3 using the command line:

gst-launch filesrc location=a.mp3 ! id3demux ! id3v23 ! filesink location=b.mp3

Heres an example of an gstreamer audio profile used by sound-juiver for
extracting CDs into MP3s:

audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lame mode=0 vbr-quality=6 ! id3v23