Question

I’m trying to write a Python script that reads the filename of my MP3s and when it finds a missing Artist tag it will take it from the first part of the filename. Most of my MP3s are titled “Artist – Title.mp3”.

But none of the ID3 tag readers work very well in Python. ID3 won’t read any tag past 1.1 and it hasn’t been developed since 2002. Mutagen raises exceptions when a file is missing tags. Eye3D requires installing a binary to get the libraries to work, ditto with pylibid3.

Am I using the wrong language? I’ve heard that Perl has some great ID3 tag libraries. I’m a novice so switching languages (it’s been a while since I’ve read a book on Perl) would mean starting over from scratch. But I’m willing to do it if Python is the wrong language.

Any thoughts?

Answer 1

It’s easy enough to handle the exception with mutagen:

from mutagen.id3 import ID3, TPE1, ID3NoHeaderError
try:
    audio = ID3(filename)
except ID3NoHeaderError:
    audio = ID3()

audio.add(TPE1(encoding=3, text=u'Artist'))
audio.save(filename)