Library for reading MP3, MP4 metadata?

[ajmas]

I am wanting to write a small media server for my home network. I will probably write it in Java, because that is where I feel the most at ease. As part of this project I need to be able to read the meta data describing the artist, album, track name, etc. Can anyone suggest a good library for doing this (it can be Java or C/C++)? Can libVLC respond to this task? Ideally the library would be currently maintained and have a stable API.

I am planning to use this either on MacOS X or Linux.

[ajmas]

Replying to my own post, and more for reference for anyone else:

I found two distinct solutions, one for MP3 and one for MP4 (both open source):
- ISOBox4J: https://contributions.coremedia.com/isobox4j
- Java Music Tag: http://javamusictag.sourceforge.net

I also saw some non Java solutions:
- ffmpeg, but according to a post ( http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=43048 ), the API is in flux, so not of much use
- Atomic Parsley ( http://atomicparsley.sourceforge.net/ ), which does a good job.

One thing, in regards to MP4, is that I couldn't seem to find any references to an official set of meta-tags for the sorts of things specified in MP3's IDv3 tags. The only references are to the Apple defined tags. Am I to understand that people are just using what Apple has already defined, rather than making an independent set?

[jama7]

Hi,

I'm also interested in getting metadata from MP4 files (and other video files). Have you (or anybody) found any other information on how to perform this task?

I thought VLC, while encoding, would access the metadata in a video file, but as I'm extremely new in this, it's been hard for me to find something related to it in the VLC source code.

Thanks for your help

[ivoire]

VLC uses taglib to read/write meta-data. That's a really nice an working library. Have a look here: http://developer.kde.org/~wheeler/taglib.html and ther http://git.videolan.org/?p=vlc.git;a=bl ... 1b;hb=HEAD