MP3info - An MP3 technical info viewer and ID3 1.x tag editor


ABOUT
=====

Q: What's MP3Info?

A: MP3Info is a little utility used to read and modify the ID3 tags of MP3
files. MP3Info can also display various technical aspects of an MP3 file
including playing time, bit-rate, sampling frequency and other attributes
in a pre-defined or user-specifiable output format.

Q: OK, so what's an 'MP3'?

A:  For those of you who have been living in a cave for the past decade, an 
MP3 (short for MPEG 1, layer 3) is a very popular digital audio file format 
which encodes an audio file with a lossy compression algorithm resulting in 
files representing a minute of near-CD quality stereo sound in less than a 
megabyte of data. Compare this to non-compressed formats (Windows .WAV files 
for instance) which encode the same minute of audio in about ten megabytes of 
data.

Q: What's an 'ID3 tag'?

A: An ID3 tag is a little scrap of data added to the beginning or end of the 
MP3 file which stores information about the audio recording including the 
title, artist, album, copyright date, and musical genre.  ID3 tags are an 
optional feature of the MP3 format, so not all MP3 files have ID3 tags.


HISTORY
=======

MP3Info was originally written by Ricardo Cerqueira <rmc@plug.pt>. Cedric 
Tefft <cedric@phreaker.net> took over maintenance in January 2000 and has been 
the primary maintainer ever since.  Over the years a number of patches, 
suggestions and bug reports have been submitted by countless individuals, some 
of whom are credited in the ChangeLog.


PORTABILITY
===========

MP3Info was developed under Linux, but should work on most UN*X variants.
Included with the text-based version is a GUI version which requires the GTK
libraries (see http://www.gtk.org).  The console version runs in plain
command-line and interactive curses mode.  The curses or ncurses library is
required.

The command-line version can also be compiled for Windows, but a precompiled 
Windows binary is included in the source distribution and as a
separate Windows-specific package.  There is currently no GUI version for
Windows.


OBTAINING THE LATEST VERSION OF MP3INFO
=======================================

MP3Info's home is the public library archive at ibiblio.org
(formerly MetaLab, formerly SunSite). Both source and i386 RPM's
(for Linux) are available as well as the aforementioned Windows executable.

HOMEPAGE 

    http://ibiblio.org/mp3info/

PRIMARY DOWNLOAD

   ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/apps/sound/mp3-utils/mp3info
   http://ibiblio.org/pub/linux/apps/sound/mp3-utils/mp3info

MIRRORS

   ftp://ftp.freesoftware.com/pub/linux/sunsite/apps/sound/mp3-utils/mp3info/
   ftp://ftp.twoguys.org/linux/apps/sound/mp3-utils/mp3info/

The entire ibiblio Linux archive (including MP3Info) is mirrored to many other 
locations around the world.  A full and current list of ibiblio mirrors can be 
found at http://ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/MIRRORS.html


INSTALLATION
============

See the file 'INSTALL' for build and installation instructions on UNIX platforms.
See win32\INSTALL-WINDOWS.txt for installation of the Windows binary.


Help/Usage/HowTo (Console Version)
==================================
MP3Info is fully documented in its manual page.  To view the manual page on a 
UNIX platform, simply type 'man mp3info' at any time after installation.  If 
you don't have groff installed on your system or for some other reason can't 
read the man page, a text-only version is available in the file mp3info.txt

There is also an HTML version of the manual page included as mp3info.html.
This is considered the the primary help file for Windows users.


Usage: GTK Version
==================

gmp3info [song.mp3]


DISCLAIMER
==========

I do not take responsibility for damaged files, MP3s or not. 

BUGS & CAVEATS
==============

Known bugs and limitations are detailed in the manual page.  If you have any
bug reports or patches, please email them to me.  Bugs get fixed a lot faster
if you include patches -- especially if the problem is platform specific.


TO DO
=====

* ID3v2 support is the most often-requested feature and is badly needed,
  however this will entail an almost complete rewrite and I'm a lazy SOB,
  so it's going to be a while yet...  Anybody wanna volunteer?

* Make format specifiers a bit more flexible (allow user to choose 
  int/float/string display arbitrarily and provide some mechanism for
  convenient magnitude displays of large numbers (KB for kilobytes, MB for
  megabytes, etc.)

* Add line-editing capabilities to curses version (I have a user-contributed 
  patch, but it's a little broken)

* Make exit codes more useful and document them better (i.e. return 1 
  if no ID3 found, 2 if MP3 is corrupt, 3 if the file wasn't found or
  something along those lines).

* Add capability to copy ID3 tags from one file to another

* Add -p format specifiers for:
	* Maximum and minimum bitrates
	* File index (first file = 0, second file = 1, etc.)



					- Cedric Tefft <cedric@phreaker.net>
					  November 6, 2006

