Reading ID3 tags in MP3 files

ID3 tags are data fields added to an MP3 file that contain information about the file, such as the song name, album name, and artist name.

To read ID3 tags from an MP3 file, use the Sound.ID3 property, whose properties correspond to the names of ID3 tags included in the MP3 file being loaded. To determine when ID3 tags for a downloading MP3 file are available, use the Sound.onID3 event handler. Flash Player 7 supports version 1.0, 1.1, 2.3, and 2.4 tags; version 2.2 tags are not supported.

For example, the following code loads an MP3 file named favoriteSong.mp3 into the Sound object named song. When the ID3 tags for the file are available, a text field named display_txt displays the artist name and song name.

var song = new Sound();
song.onID3 = function () {
  display_txt.text = "Artist: " + song.id3.TCOM + newline;
  display_txt.text += "Song: " + song.id3.TIT2);
}
song.loadSound("mp3s/favoriteSong.mp3, true");

Because ID3 2.0 tags are located at the beginning of an MP3 file (before the sound data), they are available as soon as the file starts downloading. ID3 1.0 tags, however, are located at the end of the file (after the sound data) and thus aren't available until the entire MP3 file has finished downloading.

The onID3 event handler is called each time new ID3 data is available. This means that if an MP3 file contains ID3 2.0 tags and ID3 1.0 tags, the onID3 handler will be called twice, because the tags are located in different parts of the file.

For a list of supported ID3 tags, see Sound.ID3.