IdEst
	ID3 Editing and Scripting Tool	Sergey Poznyakoff

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5 Modifying Existing Tags

To modify a particular frame, use the --set (-s) option. For example:

$ idest --set artist='Jacques Brel' track01.mp3

Several frames can be set at once. To do so you can either supply a separate --set option for each frame, or to give a single --set option followed by as many frame assignments as you need, for example:

$ idest --set artist='Jacques Brel' \
        --set title='Ne me quitte pas' track01.mp3

or

$ idest --set artist='Jacques Brel' \
        title='Ne me quitte pas' track01.mp3

You can use fully qualified form (see fully-qualified name) for frames that require it:

$ idest --set comment:eng:My_comment='Noise reduction on' \
        track01.mp3

In the example above, if a comment with this content descriptor exists, its content will be replaced with the new one. If not, a new comment frame will be created.

If a frame which can appear multiple times (such as e.g. comment) is being set without qualifiers, all existing frames of this type will be removed and replaced with the new instance. Its qualifiers will be set to default values.

Textual strings are assumed to be written in the current locale. If that’s not the case, use the --charset option, e.g.

$ idest --charset=latin1 --set artist='Lluís Llach' *.mp3

Textual strings are stored in UTF-8 by default. If you prefer another encoding, specify it with the --encoding option. The ID3 specification offers the following encodings: ‘iso-8859-1’ (or ‘latin1’), ‘utf-8’, ‘utf-16’, and ‘utf-16be’ (the suffix stands for “big-endian”). For example, to store texts in ‘utf-16’:

$ idest --encoding=utf-16 --set album='Itaca'  *.mp3

Not all devices support full ID3 specification. Most of them support only a subset of it. The --fixup command line option is provided to convert ID3 tags to a form understood by most devices. The usage is simple:

$ idest --fixup *.mp3

If the input tags also contain malformed 8-bit encodings (see broken 8bit encoding), you can fix them as shown below:

$ idest --broken-8bit-encoding=iso-8859-1 --fixup *.mp3