Simon Willison’s Weblog

PHP and ID3 tags

14th August 2002

MP3 Piranha is a clever application which indexes your MP3 collection and uses the Amazon Web Service API to look up the album cover, related albums and provide a link to buy the album from Amazon. Out of curiosity, I ran a search for a PHP library to decode ID3 tags to see if such a thing could be built with PHP, and came up with this script by Leknor. The class is well written and I learnt a lot about ID3 tags looking through it—it seems they take up the last 128 bytes of an MP3 file and can be decoded using PHP’s unpack() function.