NAME

Audio::Taglib::Simple - Read, write ID3 and other audio metadata with TagLib

SYNOPSIS

my $taglib = Audio::Taglib::Simple.new("awesome.mp3");

# read a tag
say "artist: ", $taglib.artist;

# edit a tag
$taglib.artist = "Awesome Band";
$taglib.save;

# free memory when you're done
$taglib.free;

DESCRIPTION

This module uses NativeCall to provide bindings to TagLib's C API. The C API is the "simple" API, which only provides commonly used fields that are abstracted over all file types.

If you are interested in the non-abstract API, check out the Audio::TagLib module.

TagLib supports many audio and tag formats. Audio formats include MP3, MPC, FLAC, MP4, ASF, AIFF, WAV, TrueAudio, WavPack, Ogg FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, Speex and Opus file formats. Tag formats include ID3v1, ID3v2, APE, FLAC, Xiph, iTunes-style MP4 and WMA. See their website for an exhaustive list.

TagLib is nice and fast. The example script runs on a directory of 501 files (499 are MP3, 2 are non-audio) in around 4 seconds.

METHODS

new(Str|IO $file)

Prepares to read the provided file. Dies if the file does not exist or if TagLib cannot parse it. TagLib attempts to guess the file type here.

free

Frees the internal data used by TagLib.

file returns IO

Readonly accessor to the file variable passed in.

artist() returns Str

Returns the artist of the song.

album() returns Str

Returns the name of the album associated with the song.

title() returns Str

Returns the title of the song.

comment() returns Str

A generic comment field.

genre() returns Str

A string describing the genre.

year() returns Int

Returns the year associated with the song as an integer (e.g. 2004) or 0 if not present.

track() returns Int

Returns the track number of this song as an integer (e.g. 12) or 0 if not present.

save() returns Bool

Call save after assigning to one or more tag attributes (listed above) to write out the changes.

length() returns Duration

Returns the length of the file as a Duration. TagLib provides it as an integer. Not editable.

bitrate() returns Int

Returns the bit rate of the file as an Int in kb/s. Example: 128. Not editable.

samplerate() returns Int

Returns the sample rate of the file as an Int in Hz. Example: 44100. Not editable.

channels() returns Int

Returns the number of channels present in the file as an Int. Example: 2. Not editable.

EXCEPTIONS

X::InvalidAudioFile

The constructor may raise exceptions if the file does not exist or does not appear to be audio that TagLib can parse.

file

The file that is invalid.

text

The specific error text.

CAVEATS

TagLib will start claiming some files are not valid after a certain amount of objects are creating them without freeing them.
TagLib prints some warnings to STDERR directly.
All fields are read from the metadata, and corrupted files can often have incorrect values for length. TagLib does not actually parse the music stream to find this out.
Tags are read at object initialization time. This means that if some other process modifies the tags on the music file, you won't see changes unless you create a new object.

REQUIREMENTS

Rakudo Perl 6 2014.11 or above. Tested primarily on MoarVM.
NativeCall (included in Rakudo 2015.02 and above)

TODO

See TODO.