A crate to handle reading and writing audio metadata in a generic, unified way.

Supported Formats

See the table at https://github.com/Serial-ATA/lofty-rs/blob/main/lofty/SUPPORTED_FORMATS.md.

Usage

It can be used in two ways:

Generic

Lofty provides a generic Tag type that all metadata formats can be converted into. It allows you to no longer have to think of the underlying format (ID3v2, Vorbis Comments, etc.).

This means that reading a file for simple tasks (e.g. getting the title, artist, and album for a music player) can simply be done with the following:

let file = lofty::read_from_path("path/to/file.mp3")?;

let tag = match tagged_file.primary_tag() {
    Some(primary_tag) => primary_tag,
    // If the "primary" tag doesn't exist, we just grab the
    // first tag we can find. Realistically, a tag reader would likely
    // iterate through the tags to find a suitable one.
    None => tagged_file.first_tag().expect("ERROR: No tags found!"),
};

let title = tag.title();
let artist = tag.artist();
let album = tag.album();

And that’s all!

Concrete Formats

Of course, some formats (such as ID3v2) have lots of niche features, that can’t be exposed in the generic API. That’s where you can reach for concrete types:

use lofty::mpeg::MpegFile;

let file = MpegFile::read_from_path("path/to/file.mp3")?;
let id3v2_tag = file.id3v2_tag().unwrap();

let title = id3v2_tag.title();

Regardless of the path you choose (generic or concrete), the types can easily be converted to each other:

let generic_tag: Tag = /* ... */
let concrete_tag: Id3v2Tag = generic_tag.into();

// Then...
let generic_tag: Tag = concrete_tag.into();