Newbie Needs Help

[thedbp]

Hi all,

I'm not new to the board, but i'm new to programming. Basically I need to fill some gaps, and doing it myself will probably be the best way to make sure i get what i want.

I need to write a small app/script/whatever that will read the ID3 tags on MP3 files and extract information to rename the file within the Finder. It would sport a simple dragNdrop interface with options to set the file name to be any combination or order of the information stored in the ID3 tags.

Basically i need this to make burning MP3 CD's easier for my Rio Volt. Currently, if I want the album to play in the right order, I have to add the track number to each file name. I have over 1500 songs. This just won't work doing manually.

So I need some pointers on where to look to build something like this. I'm not sure where to begin in the dev documentation, and anything anyone could do to hone down my search would be fantastic.

thanks in advance!

 

[tie]

The ID3 tag is stored in the last 128 bytes of the MP3 file. It starts with 3 bytes header (always "TAG" so you can distinguish between tagged and untagged MP3s), then 30 bytes each for the song title, artist, and album, 4 bytes for the year, 30 bytes comment (depending on the version, the last byte of the comment may be the track number; if so, then the second-to-last byte will be null '\0'), and 1 byte genre. That's it, easy.

There's some sample code for reading it at http://home.swipnet.se/grd/mp3info/ in case this explanation isn't clear enough. Other links are http://www.id3.org and http://www.id3lib.sourceforge.net/ where they talk about more complicated things which I don't understand.

 

[seb2]

tie, what you described is id3v1.x -- id3v2.x is completely different.

thedbp, i have written a small id3 parser in cocoa that will parse id3v1.0, id3v1.1 and id3v2.3 -- simply mail me if you want me to send it to you.

 

[bubbajim]

If you want to see a program in action to get ideas, ID3X does a pretty good job at renaming mp3 files. I have a collection of about 20,000 songs and would not have kept half of them if I was not able to rename them. I too started to the programming route and did some reading on how to program and I am still at it till this day (Programming in Cocoa is gonna be great).

But in the mean will I like to get ideas, and the best ideas seem to come from other programs. I see something and then I say, that's a cool feature but I wish it would do this differently.

With that said check out ID3X. (No I don't work for the programmer, I just think this app matches what you want to do).

I on the other hand am working on the idea of creating a program similar to DVD Profiler for the PC. I have an ever-increasing collection of DVDs and would like to have a robust database of information about my DVD collection without having to type in every line of it.