Reading the ID3 tag from an MP3

my research shows me that the ID3 tag is stored in the last 128 bytes of an MP3 file. i want to read out this last 128 bytes of the MP3 file into a variable so i can mess with it then write it back in. i can't figure out how to get VB.NET's binaryRead and Write objects to work even after visiting MSDN... please help. thanks

brandon

Never done this before so dont rate this as THE solution, there might be better ways to do this. But this worked for me. I had a form with a button1 and a textbox1 control and the following code in the event handler for the button.

Code:

---

Dim s As Stream = File.OpenRead("c:\Test.mp3")
Dim br As New BinaryReader(s)
Dim c As Integer
Dim sb As New System.Text.StringBuilder()

s.Seek(s.Length - 128, SeekOrigin.Begin)

For c = 1 To 128
    sb.Append(Strings.Chr(br.ReadByte))
Next

TextBox1.Text = sb.ToString

---

The writing is as easy, just use a BinaryWriter object with the Write method instead.

/Leyan

http://www.csharphelp.com/archives/archive226.html Take a look here. This site has a class that is used for reading and editing id3 tags from mp3 files.

It's a bit pitty that it is in C#. But I hope you have any use of this.

Ahh, nice example. Shouldn't be to hard to translate into VB. It does almost exactly as I did in my example aside from that it uses a FileStream object instead of a Stream. That may increase performance a bit.

And their use of System.Text.ASCIIEncoding instead of my a bit clumbsy Strings.Chr(br.ReadByte) is more consize (as I said, it wasn't THE solution :D ).

/Leyan

Thanks guys, i'm going to be trying to re-write that C# version (because i really like it) into VB.NET code. i'll post a URL for the src when i'm done.

brandon

May be you can look in to http://www.id3lib.org/ for some formal information on the id3 tags.]