Writing an ID3 tag reader

Mutant_Fruit

Over my holidays, i want to write a program that will read MP3 tags, and output a standard text file with a list of all the different albums (or whatever). This is purely for learning purposes, to get me good at programming

Are there any tutorials around that cover the basics of doing this, or the techniques i'm going to have to use to get it working, that i can use to refer to if i get stuck? Otherwise i'll have to bother you nice people a lot

daymobrew

Have you searched Google? Google Groups?

There is bound to be a few open source projects on SourceForge that deal with ID3 tags.
If you don't find info on the web you could probably read/'leverage' the source code there.

Mutant_Fruit

daymobrew wrote:

Have you searched Google? Google Groups?

I've never even heard of google groups I'll give that a wizzbang now. I'm just writing up a text document of everything the program has to be able to do in order to work. Tis quite complicated (for me anyway ).

daymobrew

http://www.id3.org and
http://www.id3.org/implementations.html

Seems to concentrate on the newest ID3 tag format (version 2).
If you know perl, there is a MP3::Info module.

NeverSayDie

As mentioned, if you're coding in Perl, there're plenty of modules on CPAN for working with ID3s. This article should be useful.

Mutant_Fruit

oops, forgot to mention i was coding in C.

I think i have enough info to get started now, so wish me luck! I've never attempted something on such a large scale. I'm only a little noobass programmer

Thanks for the links!