1,460 stars · ⚠ TWO LICENCE FILES AND NO PLAIN LICENSE OR COPYING IN THE ROOT AT ALL: /blob/master/COPYING.LGPL is the stock unmodified LGPL v2.1 of February 1999, and /blob/master/COPYING.MPL is Mozilla Public Licence 1.1 — NOT 2.0 — whose Exhibit A is left as an unfilled template ("The Original Code is ______", "The Initial Developer of the Original Code is ______"). Neither file names a TagLib copyright holder · v2.3.2 (2026-09-05; the GitHub page shows "05 Sep" with no year and the year was settled by the ungh releases mirror, publishedAt 2026-09-05T05:05:29Z) · Track this in Scout
The C++ library that reads and writes the metadata inside audio files across MP3, MP4, FLAC, Ogg and more.
▶Repo detailsthe review · specs · pros & cons · install
What it is
TagLib handles the tag formats of MP3, MP4, FLAC, Ogg, WAV, AIFF, WMA and more behind one interface. It has been maintained in this repository since March 2011, and at 1,460 stars it sits well under the hidden-gem line while being one of the most widely deployed libraries in this edition.
What it is good for. Anyone writing something that touches an audio collection — a player, a tagger, a library organiser, a conversion script. It is the reason a program can open a FLAC and an MP3 without knowing anything about either format.
- 1,460 stars for a library that ships inside a very large number of music players. Code was pushed on 2 October 2026, two days before this edition.
- It can both read and write, unlike several of the smaller alternatives, and version 2 added a cleaner interface.
- The newest release, v2.3.2, is dated 5 September 2026. The GitHub page gives that date without a year; the ungh mirror settled it.
- The licence is two licences, and one of them is a blank form. There is no
LICENSEand noCOPYINGin the root at all. Instead there areCOPYING.LGPL, the plain unmodified LGPL version 2.1, andCOPYING.MPL, which is Mozilla Public Licence 1.1, not 2.0 — and its Exhibit A is left as an unfilled template: "The Original Code is _____." and "The Initial Developer of the Original Code is ___." Neither file names a TagLib copyright holder. You choose which licence to take, and under the MPL side the fields a redistributor is meant to rely on are empty. - There is no simple install. You run CMake with a C++17 compiler, and you must supply
utf8cppyourself. On Windows that means Visual Studio Build Tools 2022 and vcpkg. - Version 2 moved to C++17 and an external dependency, so anything built against version 1 needs porting. No memory or disk figure is published.
quodlibet/mutagenThe same job in pure Python with nothing to compile, but GPL-2.0-or-later rather than LGPL, which matters if you ship a closed program.
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MediaArea/MediaInfoLibReports far more about a media file, including video, but it is about inspecting rather than editing tags.
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The .NET port, for the same work from C#, but it has taken no code since 31 May 2025.
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sudo apt install cmake g++ libutfcpp-dev zlib1g-dev cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release . make sudo make install
