I don't know why or how these got attached to some files in my music collection but it's been a problem thats been bugging me for some time. I use SlimServer for music listening and a few mp3s were not showing the proper tags even though I've triple checked the id3v2 tags. I ended up looking into the file itself and noticed right at the end of the file the tag information I had been trying to remove with the header APETAGEXÐ and with a little searching found that its an APEv2 tag attached to the file. I did some searching for a program to remove it but I couldn't find anything non-windows, however there is a library in python that can work with them called Mutagen. So I ended up scripting up a little program to rid of the tag and now the files index properly.

If anyone else is running into this problem you can install the python-mutagen package (in debian) and then use the following simple python script apetag-remove.

posted at: 15:14 | path: /general | permanent link to this entry