Using hsaudiotag

To read a file’s metadata with hsaudiotag, pick a class corresponding to the file you want to read, create an instance of it with the a file object or a filename as an argument, and fetch the attributes from it. For example, if you want to fetch attributes from a mp4 file, you’d do:

>>> from hsaudiotag import mp4
>>> myfile = mp4.File('foo.m4a')
>>> myfile.artist
'Built To Spill'
>>> myfile.album
'There Is No Enemy'
>>> myfile.duration
218

Available attributes

valid

Whether the file could correctly be read or not.

artist - album - title - genre - year - track - comment

Tags present in the audio file. All strings, return an empty string is not present.

duration

Duration of the audio file, in seconds (always as integer).

bitrate

The bitrate of the audio file.

sample_rate

The sample rate of the audio file.

size

The size of the file, in bytes.

audio_size

The size of the audio part of the file, that is, with metadata removed. In bytes.

audio_offset

The offset, in bytes, at which audio data starts in the file.

The mpeg.Mpeg and aiff.File classes are special cases where tags are contained in the tag attribute.

Available classes

• mpeg.Mpeg for mp3 files.
• mp4.File for mp4 files.
• wma.WMADecoder for wma files.
• ogg.Vorbis for ogg files.
• flac.FLAC for flac files.
• aiff.File for aiff files.

auto.File

Since v1.1, there’s a new wrapper class, auto.File which automatically detects the type of the file and provides a unified interface to its attributes (something the different classes of hsaudiotag don’t have). To use it, instantiate it like you would with any other class, that is auto.File(filename_or_file_object). All the attributes are in the wrapper, but if you want to access the “original” class, use the original attribute. Example:

>>> from hsaudiotag import auto
>>> myfile = auto.File('foo.m4a')
>>> myfile.artist
'Built To Spill'
>>> myfile.album
'There Is No Enemy'
>>> myfile.duration
218
>>>> myfile.original
<mp4.File object>