Vorbiscomment (1) Linux Manual Page

vorbiscomment – List or edit comments in Ogg Vorbis files

Synopsis

vorbiscomment [-l] [-R] [-e] file.ogg
vorbiscomment -a [ -c commentfile | -t “name=value” ] [-q] [-R] [-e] in.ogg [out.ogg]
vorbiscomment -w [ -c commentfile | -t “name=value” ] [-q] [-R] [-e] in.ogg [out.ogg]

Description

vorbiscomment Reads, modifies, and appends Ogg Vorbis audio file metadata tags.

Options

-a, –append

Append comments.

-c file, –commentfile file

Take comments from a file. The file is the same format as is output by the -l option or given to the -t option: one element per line in ‘tag=value’ format. If the file is /dev/null and -w was passed, the existing comments will be removed.

-h, –help

Show command help.

-l, –list

List the comments in the Ogg Vorbis file.

-t ‘name=value’, –tag ‘name=value’

Specify a new tag on the command line. Each tag is given as a single string. The part before the ‘=’ is treated as the tag name and the part after as the value.

-w, –write

Replace comments with the new set given either on the command line with -t or from a file with -c. If neither -c nor -t is given, the new set will be read from the standard input.

-R, –raw

Read and write comments in UTF-8, rather than converting to the user’s character set.

-e, –escapes

Quote/unquote newlines and backslashes in the comments. This ensures every comment is exactly one line in the output (or input), allowing to filter and round-trip them. Without it, you can only write multi-line comments by using -t and you can’t reliably distinguish them from multiple one-line comments.

Supported escapes are c-style "\n", "\r", "\\" and "\0". A backslash followed by anything else is an error.

Note: currently, anything after the first "\0" is thrown away while writing. This is a bug — the Vorbis format can safely store null characters, but most other tools wouldn’t handle them anyway.

-V, –version

Display the version of vorbiscomment.

Examples

To just see what comment tags are in a file:

vorbiscomment -l file.ogg

To edit those comments:

vorbiscomment -l file.ogg > file.txt
[edit the comments in file.txt to your satisfaction]
vorbiscomment -w -c file.txt file.ogg newfile.ogg

To simply add a comment:

vorbiscomment -a -t ‘ARTIST=No One You Know’ file.ogg newfile.ogg

To add a set of comments from the standard input:

vorbiscomment -a file.ogg
ARTIST=No One You Know
ALBUM=The Famous Album
<ctrl-d>

Tag Format

See http://xiph.org/vorbis/doc/v-comment.html for documentation on the Ogg Vorbis tag format, including a suggested list of canonical tag names.

Authors

Program Authors:

Michael Smith <msmith [at] xiph.org>
Ralph Giles <giles [at] xiph.org>

Manpage Author:

Christopher L Cheney <ccheney [at] debian.org>

vorbiscomment (1) Linux Manual Page