Retrieve MP3 Metadata with ffprobe

What should you do when you want to introduce your favorite songs, the ones you always listen to, on a blog or something? If it's just the song names, you might be able to select all the folders and copy them.

But what if you also want to write the artist names?

At this point, it becomes programming, but what if you want to get only the titles of a specific artist in a folder?

That's when ffmpeg's "ffprobe" comes in handy.

Want to Know the Types of Metadata

If you want to know the types of metadata in the first place, use the ffprobe command. For cases like wondering how BPM is written...

ffprobe "0002 - Broken 8cmix.mp3"

Metadata:
encoder         : LAME 32bits version 3.99.5 (http://lame.sf.net)
title           : Broken 8cmix
artist          : iroha(sasaki)
album           : Sound Voltex Soundtrack
track           : 2
album_artist    : Various Artists
disc            : 1/3
TBPM            : 150
TLEN            : 107205

Output MP3 Metadata as CSV

By replacing the format_tags= option with any metadata, you can change the output.

for f in *; do 
 echo "\
 $(ffprobe -loglevel error -show_entries format_tags=track -of default=noprint_wrappers=1:nokey=1 "$f"),\
 $(ffprobe -loglevel error -show_entries format_tags=title -of default=noprint_wrappers=1:nokey=1 "$f"),\
 $(ffprobe -loglevel error -show_entries format_tags=artist -of default=noprint_wrappers=1:nokey=1 "$f")\
 " 
done

Output MP3 Metadata as CSV (with Double Quotes)

for f in *; do 
 echo "\
 \"$(ffprobe -loglevel error -show_entries format_tags=track -of default=noprint_wrappers=1:nokey=1 "$f")\",\
 \"$(ffprobe -loglevel error -show_entries format_tags=title -of default=noprint_wrappers=1:nokey=1 "$f")\",\
 \"$(ffprobe -loglevel error -show_entries format_tags=artist -of default=noprint_wrappers=1:nokey=1 "$f")\"\
 " 
done

Other Features

• Want to know the number of songs

You can count the number of songs by counting the number of output lines with | wc -l.

• mp3info

By the way, there's also an option called mp3info, but mp3info is not recommended because it has many bugs.

$ mp3info -p %t "0002 - Broken 8cmix.mp3"
%a
$ mp3info -p %t "0008 - smoooochã»âã» KN mix.mp3"
smooooch??? KN mix

It has garbled characters or some kind of strange conversion. Not good.