Audio Tags

What it's for

See what a sound file says about itself, and remove it. Music and recordings carry tags: title, artist, album, cover pictures, comments, the software and sometimes the person or company that made them. This shows the tags and the file’s format and length, saves the pictures, and saves a copy without the tags.

For example, before you share a recording made with a phone app, open it here to see what it records about you, and save a copy without its tags.

How to use it

Choose a sound file, or drop it on the page. It reads:

• MP3, with ID3v2 (versions 2.2 to 2.4), ID3v1 and APE tags.
• FLAC and Ogg (Vorbis and Opus), with their comments and pictures.
• M4A, AAC and other MP4 audio, with iTunes-style tags.
• WAV, with its INFO list, ID3 chunk and broadcast (BWF) details.

The first table gives the format, length, sample rate, channels and, for MP3, the bitrate. Tags lists every tag (with Copy buttons), and Pictures shows any pictures, each with a Save button.

For MP3, FLAC and WAV, Save without tags saves a copy, named like song-untagged.mp3, without the tags and pictures. The sound itself is copied unchanged.

Example

In the Tone Generator, save a 2-second sine wave, then open the file here.

The table shows the format WAV (PCM), length 0:02.00, sample rate 48,000 Hz, 1 channel and 16 bits a sample, and there are no tags.

Good to know

Removing tags isn’t offered for M4A or Ogg files, whose tags are woven into the file’s structure. An MP3’s length is exact when it has an Xing or Info header (most encoders add one) and otherwise estimated from its bitrate, which is wrong for files with a changing bitrate.

A sound can carry other information, such as background noise or speech, that no tag remover touches.