MP3 Tag (ID3) Viewer & Cover Art Extractor
Every MP3 carries its title, artist and album in an ID3 tag glued to the front of the file, and most players show you a tidied-up version of it rather than what is actually stored. When a track sorts wrongly, shows the wrong year, or has a cover you want back out, you need to see the tag itself. This viewer reads it directly: the ID3v2 frames with their four-character identifiers, the older ID3v1 block at the end of the file when one is there, and the first MPEG audio frame, which is what actually tells you the bitrate, sample rate, channel mode and length. Embedded pictures are shown and can be downloaded, with their picture type — front cover, back cover, artist — spelled out. The fiddly parts of the format are handled rather than glossed over. Tag sizes are synchsafe, seven bits to the byte; ID3v2.4 sizes its frames that way too while 2.3 does not; text frames carry their own encoding byte and may be Latin-1, UTF-8 or UTF-16 with a byte order mark; and a tag marked unsynchronised has byte pairs that must be collapsed before anything can be read. Nothing is uploaded — the file is parsed in your browser.
How to use
- Drop an .mp3 file, or click to choose one.
- Read the audio block for bitrate, sample rate, channel mode and length.
- Read the tag block: each row is a frame, with its ID3 name spelled out.
- Download any embedded cover art at its original size.
- Copy the plain-text summary if you need the values elsewhere.
Frequently asked questions
- Why does my player show a different title from the tag?
- Players often prefer one source over another, and a file can carry both an ID3v2 tag at the front and an older ID3v1 block at the end with different values. Both are shown separately here, which usually explains the disagreement.
- What is a synchsafe integer?
- A number stored seven bits to the byte, with the top bit of each byte kept clear so the size can never look like the start of an MPEG frame. Reading one as an ordinary big-endian integer is the classic ID3 mistake — it comes out about 14% too large and every frame after it lands in the wrong place.
- Why is the duration marked as an estimate?
- A constant-bitrate file has no stored length, so it is worked out from the file size and the bitrate. Variable-bitrate files usually carry a Xing header with the real frame count; when that is present the length is exact and the frame count is shown instead.
- Can I get the album art out?
- Yes. Every embedded picture is displayed with its type and format, and can be downloaded exactly as it is stored — no re-encoding.
- Does it edit tags?
- No, it only reads them. That keeps it safe to use on a file you care about: nothing is written, and the file never leaves your browser.
- Which ID3 versions are supported?
- ID3v2.2, 2.3 and 2.4 for the main tag, including the three-character frame identifiers 2.2 used, plus the ID3v1 and v1.1 blocks at the end of the file.
Guides on this topic
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