pytaglib is a Python audio tagging library. It is cross-platform and very simple to use yet fully featured:
- supports more than a dozen file formats including mp3, flac, ogg, wma, and mp4,
- support arbitrary, non-standard tag names,
- support multiple values per tag.
pytaglib is a very thin wrapper around the fast and rock-solid TagLib C++ library.
2025-11-17 pytaglib-3.1.0 has been released.
- build wheels for recent Python versions (up to 3.14)
- build wheels for PyPy again
- bump bundled taglib (in wheels) to v2.1.1
For a full list of changes in this and previous releases, see the Changelog.
Use your favorite Python package manager to install the pytaglib package. Example when using pip:
pip install pytaglib
In most cases, this should pick a provided binary wheel that bundles the native TagLib library suitable for your platform. If it doesn't, and the installation fails, see below.
>>> import taglib
>>> with taglib.File("/path/to/my/file.mp3", save_on_exit=True) as song:
>>> song.tags
{'ARTIST': ['piman', 'jzig'], 'ALBUM': ['Quod Libet Test Data'], 'TITLE': ['Silence'], 'GENRE': ['Silence'], 'TRACKNUMBER': ['02/10'], 'DATE': ['2004']}
>>> song.length
239
>>> song.tags["ALBUM"] = ["White Album"] # always use lists, even for single values
>>> del song.tags["DATE"]
>>> song.tags["GENRE"] = ["Vocal", "Classical"]
>>> song.tags["PERFORMER:HARPSICHORD"] = ["Ton Koopman"]
>>> # with save_on_exit=True, file will be saved at the end of the 'with' blockFor detailed API documentation, use the docstrings of the taglib.File class or view the source code directly.
This package also installs the pyprinttags script. It takes one or more files as
command-line parameters and will display all known metadata of that files on the terminal.
If unsupported tags (a.k.a. non-textual information) are found, they can optionally be removed
from the file.
Things are a bit more complicated than usual with Python because pytaglib requires the native (C++) TagLib library.
If there are no binary wheels for your platform, or you want to manually compile pytaglib, you will need to have Taglib installed with development headers, and also development tools for Python.
On Ubuntu, Mint and other Debian-Based distributions, install
the libtag1-dev and python-dev packages. On Fedora and friends, these are called taglib-devel and python-devel, respectively. On a Mac, use HomeBrew to install the taglib package. For Windows, see below.
As an alternative, run python build_native_taglib.py in this directory to
automatically download and build the latest Taglib version into the lib/taglib-cpp subdirectory (also works on
Windows).
This requires Python and a suitable compiler to be installed; specific instructions are beyond the scope of this README.
- Debian- and Ubuntu-based linux flavors have binary packages for the Python 3 version, called
python3-taglib. Unfortunatelly, they are heavily outdated, so you should instally the recent version viapipwhenever possible. - For Arch users, there is a package in the user repository (AUR).
To create a binary wheel for your platform, use any PEP-517 compatible build frontend. Example using build:
python -m build
or with uv:
uv build
which will place the wheel inside the dist directory.
Install MS Visual Studio Build Tools (or the complete IE) and include the correct compiler version as detailed here. Also enable cmake in the Visual Studio Installer.
Then:
- open the VS native tools command prompt
- navigate to the pytaglib repository
- run
python build_native_taglib.pywhich will download and build the latest official TagLib release - run
python setup.py install
To start hacking (contributions welcome!), clone the repository and set up a project environment with your favorite tool. I use uv, where you should need only two commands for most workflows:
# set up virtual environment, run cythonize, compile
$ uv sync --reinstall
# run tests
$ uv run pytest
For bug reports or feature requests, please use the issue tracker on GitHub. For anything else, contact me by email.
