Manage MP3 metadata from iTunes with eyed3

• Posted 12 January 2024
• Tagged with macos, python

I have a couple of scripts that manipulate metadata in my iTunes library with the eyed3 library. The library isn’t particularly well-documented; these are some notes on how iTunes features map into eyed3.

Details > Year

In iTunes, you can set a year for a track: Get Info > Details > Year.

To retrieve this value with eyed3:

import eyed3  # 0.9.7

audiofile = eyed3.load("song.mp3")

print(audiofile.tag.getBestDate())

Note that although you get a nice string representation of the date entered in iTunes, the value returned by getBestDate is actually a eyed3.core.Date instance. You need to stringify it to get the value entered in iTunes.

The getBestDate() function is inspecting several ID3 tags; the one set by iTunes is tag.recording_date.

To set this value with eyed3:

import eyed3  # 0.9.7
from eyed3.core import Date

audiofile = eyed3.load("song.mp3")

audiofile.tag.recording_date = Date(year=2017)
audiofile.tag.save()

Artwork

In iTunes, you can set one or image images as artwork for a track: Get Info > Artwork.

To retrieve these images with eyed3:

import io

import eyed3  # 0.9.7
from PIL import Image

audiofile = eyed3.load("song.mp3")

for i, af_image in enumerate(audiofile.tag.images):
    im = Image.open(io.BytesIO(af_image.image_data))
    im.save(f'image-{i}.{im.format.lower()}')
    # image-0.jpg, image-1.png, ...

To store artwork with eyed3:

import eyed3
from eyed3.id3.frames import ImageFrame
from PIL import Image

audiofile = eyed3.load("song.mp3")

artwork = "album-art.png"

audiofile.tag.images.set(
    ImageFrame.OTHER,
    img_data=open(artwork, "rb").read(),
    mime_type=Image.open(artwork).get_format_mimetype()
)

audiofile.tag.save()

Note that this set() function takes two optional parameters: description and img_url.