New!!!
ID3Editor.philsmith.com now handles AIFFs and WAVES! It can even replace AIFF audio
with WAVE audio (although that takes a while due to the difference in endianness) and
vice versa. Just not mp3s, that's apples and oranges. It can also handle replacing non-PCM
(compressed) audio, although it gets dicey cross-platform. It's been tested for
fl32 floating point compression, but that's all. It doesn't yet write a 'fact' chunk
into wave files when replacing audio with compressed aiff audio, but it seems like it
works anyway. Also it doesn't update the 'MARK' chunk in aiffs either, but again, seems
to work nonetheless.
I still don't know about the value of tagging WAVEs, iTunes refuses to recognize tagged
WAVEs, although that's totally arbitrary. AIFFs and WAVEs both come from the same source,
Electronic Art's IFF format on the Commodore Amiga. iTunes puts an ID3 tag in an AIFF chunk
(called ID3) and could easily do the same with a chunk in a WAVE file. That's what this
editor does, but iTunes ignores it.
The Story:
It all started when I built an
online mp3 player. I wanted
a progress bar with a waveform, like SoundCloud's. But it
was hard to keep track of all those pngs, so I thought to
myself that I could keep them inside the mp3 as part of the
"metadata". So I read up on
ID3s and built myself an ID3 parser.
But then it was clear that the tools for manipulating
the metadata were insufficient. For example, in iTunes I
could only add one comment and one picture. That meant
the waveform picture would also be the album picture and
the file icon, and that just wasn't right. So…
I started to build an online ID3 editor with more capabilites
than the ones I could find. At the same time, I was getting
frustrated with the fact that every time I created a new
mp3 file, I had to replicate all the metadata. My mp3
player was coming to rely heavily upon it, as it's a
great way to store information. One sleepless night,
thinking about this problem, I had an epiphany: it made
more sense to replace the audio.
So I built that into this ID3 Editor. If you produce mp3s
and want to maintain things like comments and pictures and
all the other metadata, especially lyrics, upload the mp3
and replace the audio.The specifications state that there
are no limits to the number of pictures but the descriptions
must be unique. Same with comments.
Also, I added the ability to copy metadata from one file
to another. If you're always entering the same metadata,
like composer and lyricist, you'll find this feature
very useful.
If you find any bugs or have any enhancement requests,
please email me@philsmith.com.
I hope you find this site to be useful.