Mutagen is a Python module to handle audio metadata. It supports ASF, FLAC, MP4, Monkey’s Audio, MP3, Musepack, Ogg Opus, Ogg FLAC, Ogg Speex, Ogg Theora, Ogg Vorbis, True Audio, WavPack, OptimFROG, and AIFF audio files. All versions of ID3v2 are supported, and all standard ID3v2.4 frames are parsed. It can read Xing headers to accurately calculate the bitrate and length of MP3s. ID3 and APEv2 tags can be edited regardless of audio format. It can also manipulate Ogg streams on an individual packet/page level.

Mutagen works with Python 3.7+ (CPython and PyPy) on Linux, Windows and macOS, and has no dependencies outside the Python standard library. Mutagen is licensed under the GPL version 2 or later.

For more information visit https://mutagen.readthedocs.org

There is a brief tutorial with several API examples.

# Installing

    python3 -m pip install mutagen

or

    sudo apt-get install python3-mutagen

# Where do I get it?

Mutagen is hosted on GitHub. The download page or PyPI will have the latest version or check out the git repository:

    $ git clone https://github.com/quodlibet/mutagen.git

# Why Mutagen?

Quod Libet has more strenuous requirements in a tagging library than most programs that deal with tags. Therefore we felt it was necessary to write our own.

- Mutagen has a simple API, that is roughly the same across all tag formats and versions and integrates into Python’s builtin types and interfaces.

- New frame types and file formats are easily added, and the behavior of the current formats can be changed by extending them.

- Freeform keys, multiple values, Unicode, and other advanced features were considered from the start and are fully supported.

- All ID3v2 versions and all ID3v2.4 frames are covered, including rare ones like POPM or RVA2.

- We take automated testing very seriously. All bug fixes are committed with a test that prevents them from recurring, and new features are committed with a full test suite.

# Real World Use

Mutagen can load nearly every MP3 we have thrown at it (when it hasn’t, we make it do so). Scripts are included so you can run the same tests on your collection.

The following software projects are using Mutagen for tagging:

- Ex Falso and Quod Libet, a flexible tagger and player

- Beets, a music library manager and MusicBrainz tagger

- Picard, cross-platform MusicBrainz tagger

- Puddletag, an audio tag editor

- Exaile, a media player aiming to be similar to KDE’s AmaroK, but for GTK+