MP3 Tag Editor (ID3) & Album Art

About the MP3 Tag Editor (ID3) & Album Art

Edit the information your music player shows: title, artist, album, album artist, track and disc numbers, year, genre, composer, comment and lyrics, and the cover art. Open an MP3 (ID3v2.2, 2.3 and 2.4, and ID3v1), an M4A or M4B audiobook (iTunes metadata), a FLAC file (Vorbis comments and pictures) or an OGG or Opus file, and every tag it has appears in the form, with the cover beside it.

Only the tags change. The audio is copied byte for byte — nothing is decoded or re-encoded, so the sound is exactly as before — and everything else in the tag is kept: ratings, ReplayGain values, MusicBrainz ids, sort names, chapters and the like. After every change the page builds the new file in your browser, reads it back and compares the tags and the audio bytes, and tells you what it checked. The cover can be replaced, removed or kept as an image file, and every tag can be removed at once; the finished file is saved with a pass, or after unlocking that result. Your files never leave your device.

Common uses

• Fixing songs that show up as “Unknown artist” or “Track 01” in a music app.
• Adding album art to MP3s so they show a cover on a phone, a car stereo or a smart speaker.
• Putting the right track and disc numbers on an album so it plays in order.
• Adding lyrics to songs for players that show them.
• Removing all tags (and the personal details in them) before sharing a recording.

What is changed in each format

• MP3: the ID3v2 tag at the start of the file is written again as ID3v2.3 (the default, which every player reads) or ID3v2.4. The form’s fields are the frames TIT2, TPE1, TALB, TPE2, TRCK, TPOS, TYER and TDAT (2.3) or TDRC (2.4), TCON, TCOM, COMM, USLT and APIC; all other frames are carried over, converted where 2.3 and 2.4 differ. When the new tag fits in the space of the old one, the audio stays where it was. An old 128-byte ID3v1 tag at the end is updated (or removed or added, as you choose); an APEv2 tag at the end is kept unless you remove all tags.
• M4A, M4B and MP4 audio: the iTunes metadata list (moov › udta › meta › ilst, from the QuickTime file format): ©nam, ©ART, aART, ©alb, ©wrt, ©gen, ©day, trkn, disk, ©cmt, ©lyr and covr; other items stay. If the index of the file grows and sits in front of the audio, the audio’s chunk offsets are adjusted — in fragmented files (some streaming downloads) also the offsets of the fragments and the fragment index — or a padding atom next to it takes up the difference. Remove all tags also takes out the QuickTime and 3GPP metadata outside the iTunes list, such as the place a recording was made.
• FLAC: the VORBIS_COMMENT block and the PICTURE blocks (RFC 9639); STREAMINFO, SEEKTABLE, CUESHEET and APPLICATION blocks are kept, and the padding is used so the audio frames usually stay in place.
• OGG and Opus: the comment header (Vorbis comments, RFC 7845 for Opus), with the cover as a METADATA_BLOCK_PICTURE comment. The pages that follow are renumbered and their checksums recalculated when the header pages change (RFC 3533); the audio packets are copied as they are.

How the page checks the new file

Every time you change something, the page writes the new file in memory, reads it again with the same parser it uses for your file, and compares two things: that every field and picture reads back exactly as you entered it, and that the audio — the MPEG frames, the MP4 media data, the FLAC frames or the Ogg packets — is byte for byte the original. For MP4 files it also checks that the file’s index (chunk and fragment offsets) still points at that same audio. The line under the form says how many bytes of audio it compared. If anything differed, the file would not be saved.

Fields you do not change are written back exactly as they were — several values, a full date with a time, a numeric genre, the text encoding and, in FLAC and Ogg files, the field’s own name such as YEAR or ALBUM ARTIST. The exception is switching an MP3 between ID3v2.3 and ID3v2.4: then every field is written again in the new version’s form.

Cover art that works everywhere

Most players and phones show a JPEG or PNG front cover; a square picture of about 500 to 1000 pixels a side looks sharp and keeps the file small. Very large covers (several megabytes) make some players and car stereos slow, which is why new pictures larger than 1000 px are made a 1000 px JPEG unless you untick that. MP4 files hold only JPEG, PNG and BMP covers and have no picture types, so every picture there counts as the cover.

Limitations

• One file at a time. WAV, AIFF, WMA, raw AAC (ADTS) and Ogg FLAC files are not edited here; convert them with the Audio Converter first.
• The form edits the common fields; other tag items are kept as they are but not shown for editing.
• Several values in one field (two artists in ID3v2.4 or Vorbis comments) are shown joined with “; ” and are saved as one value if you change that field.
• ID3v2.3 holds a year or a full date (year, month and day) but not a year with only a month; choose ID3v2.4 for that.
• The free preview edits and checks the tags on your own file; saving the tagged file needs a pass.

Privacy

Everything happens in your browser. What you enter or open here is not uploaded or stored by MySmartCoPilot.