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Introduction
Introduction
libmp4tag is an MP4 tagging library where all tags can be accessed and modified. It is designed so that when the tags are re-written to the MP4 file, all tags will be preserved, whether the tag is known, unknown or custom.
A simple command line utility is included as an example for developers and as a simple way to modify MP4 file tags.
Notes:
The 'gnre' tag is always converted to '©gen' when writing the tag data, and '©gen' is used internally.
libmp4tag was written by Brad Lanam in August 2023 for use by the BallroomDJ 4 application.
Finding a library that would allow processing of the tags I needed for MP4 audio files proved to be difficult. The libraries that claimed to handle many audio formats would only allow access to "known" tags or bypassed tags that I needed, or didn't handle custom tags. An MP4 specific library I found had the same issues. One of the large well known applications that has metadata support also has the same issues.
In this process of researching and working with audio tag libraries, I realized that many of the popular applications were not processing tags correctly. Either by writing incorrect tag data or by losing metadata. My new determination for BallroomDJ 4 is to not be one of those applications, and the libmp4tag library was written for this purpose so that the metadata would not get lost.
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