"Fossies" - the Fresh Open Source Software Archive

Member "mp3info-0.8.5a/README" (10 Nov 2006, 5063 Bytes) of package /linux/misc/old/mp3info-0.8.5a.tgz:

    1 MP3info - An MP3 technical info viewer and ID3 1.x tag editor
    2 
    3 
    4 ABOUT
    5 =====
    6 
    7 Q: What's MP3Info?
    8 
    9 A: MP3Info is a little utility used to read and modify the ID3 tags of MP3
   10 files. MP3Info can also display various technical aspects of an MP3 file
   11 including playing time, bit-rate, sampling frequency and other attributes
   12 in a pre-defined or user-specifiable output format.
   13 
   14 Q: OK, so what's an 'MP3'?
   15 
   16 A:  For those of you who have been living in a cave for the past decade, an 
   17 MP3 (short for MPEG 1, layer 3) is a very popular digital audio file format 
   18 which encodes an audio file with a lossy compression algorithm resulting in 
   19 files representing a minute of near-CD quality stereo sound in less than a 
   20 megabyte of data. Compare this to non-compressed formats (Windows .WAV files 
   21 for instance) which encode the same minute of audio in about ten megabytes of 
   22 data.
   23 
   24 Q: What's an 'ID3 tag'?
   25 
   26 A: An ID3 tag is a little scrap of data added to the beginning or end of the 
   27 MP3 file which stores information about the audio recording including the 
   28 title, artist, album, copyright date, and musical genre.  ID3 tags are an 
   29 optional feature of the MP3 format, so not all MP3 files have ID3 tags.
   30 
   31 
   32 HISTORY
   33 =======
   34 
   35 MP3Info was originally written by Ricardo Cerqueira <rmc@plug.pt>. Cedric 
   36 Tefft <cedric@phreaker.net> took over maintenance in January 2000 and has been 
   37 the primary maintainer ever since.  Over the years a number of patches, 
   38 suggestions and bug reports have been submitted by countless individuals, some 
   39 of whom are credited in the ChangeLog.
   40 
   41 
   42 PORTABILITY
   43 ===========
   44 
   45 MP3Info was developed under Linux, but should work on most UN*X variants.
   46 Included with the text-based version is a GUI version which requires the GTK
   47 libraries (see http://www.gtk.org).  The console version runs in plain
   48 command-line and interactive curses mode.  The curses or ncurses library is
   49 required.
   50 
   51 The command-line version can also be compiled for Windows, but a precompiled 
   52 Windows binary is included in the source distribution and as a
   53 separate Windows-specific package.  There is currently no GUI version for
   54 Windows.
   55 
   56 
   57 OBTAINING THE LATEST VERSION OF MP3INFO
   58 =======================================
   59 
   60 MP3Info's home is the public library archive at ibiblio.org
   61 (formerly MetaLab, formerly SunSite). Both source and i386 RPM's
   62 (for Linux) are available as well as the aforementioned Windows executable.
   63 
   64 HOMEPAGE 
   65 
   66     http://ibiblio.org/mp3info/
   67 
   68 PRIMARY DOWNLOAD
   69 
   70    ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/apps/sound/mp3-utils/mp3info
   71    http://ibiblio.org/pub/linux/apps/sound/mp3-utils/mp3info
   72 
   73 MIRRORS
   74 
   75    ftp://ftp.freesoftware.com/pub/linux/sunsite/apps/sound/mp3-utils/mp3info/
   76    ftp://ftp.twoguys.org/linux/apps/sound/mp3-utils/mp3info/
   77 
   78 The entire ibiblio Linux archive (including MP3Info) is mirrored to many other 
   79 locations around the world.  A full and current list of ibiblio mirrors can be 
   80 found at http://ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/MIRRORS.html
   81 
   82 
   83 INSTALLATION
   84 ============
   85 
   86 See the file 'INSTALL' for build and installation instructions on UNIX platforms.
   87 See win32\INSTALL-WINDOWS.txt for installation of the Windows binary.
   88 
   89 
   90 Help/Usage/HowTo (Console Version)
   91 ==================================
   92 MP3Info is fully documented in its manual page.  To view the manual page on a 
   93 UNIX platform, simply type 'man mp3info' at any time after installation.  If 
   94 you don't have groff installed on your system or for some other reason can't 
   95 read the man page, a text-only version is available in the file mp3info.txt
   96 
   97 There is also an HTML version of the manual page included as mp3info.html.
   98 This is considered the the primary help file for Windows users.
   99 
  100 
  101 Usage: GTK Version
  102 ==================
  103 
  104 gmp3info [song.mp3]
  105 
  106 
  107 DISCLAIMER
  108 ==========
  109 
  110 I do not take responsibility for damaged files, MP3s or not. 
  111 
  112 BUGS & CAVEATS
  113 ==============
  114 
  115 Known bugs and limitations are detailed in the manual page.  If you have any
  116 bug reports or patches, please email them to me.  Bugs get fixed a lot faster
  117 if you include patches -- especially if the problem is platform specific.
  118 
  119 
  120 TO DO
  121 =====
  122 
  123 * ID3v2 support is the most often-requested feature and is badly needed,
  124   however this will entail an almost complete rewrite and I'm a lazy SOB,
  125   so it's going to be a while yet...  Anybody wanna volunteer?
  126 
  127 * Make format specifiers a bit more flexible (allow user to choose 
  128   int/float/string display arbitrarily and provide some mechanism for
  129   convenient magnitude displays of large numbers (KB for kilobytes, MB for
  130   megabytes, etc.)
  131 
  132 * Add line-editing capabilities to curses version (I have a user-contributed 
  133   patch, but it's a little broken)
  134 
  135 * Make exit codes more useful and document them better (i.e. return 1 
  136   if no ID3 found, 2 if MP3 is corrupt, 3 if the file wasn't found or
  137   something along those lines).
  138 
  139 * Add capability to copy ID3 tags from one file to another
  140 
  141 * Add -p format specifiers for:
  142 	* Maximum and minimum bitrates
  143 	* File index (first file = 0, second file = 1, etc.)
  144 
  145 
  146 
  147 					- Cedric Tefft <cedric@phreaker.net>
  148 					  November 6, 2006
  149