Is there any way to retrieve metadata from an AIFF file in Ubuntu?

Question

I am trying to get the metadata from AIFF files in Ubuntu. I want the album art as well as the title and artist.

Is there any utility or solution available to do this?

Answer 1

I found mediainfo which seems to be able to handle the aiff files correctly.

sudo apt-get install mediainfo mediainfo-gui

To retrieve the album art (I think it's MIME encoded) use the -f command line option, or set Debug to Complete in the GUI.

Answer 2

You can use ExifTool to read the metadata from AIFF files, as well as a wide variety of other formats. You can call exiftool [yourfile] to get a listing of any tags in the file's default format.

You can use this list of the available metadata/tags here, as well as the exiftool CLI documentation to extract a particular tag.

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Lastly, there's a lot of GUI-based music/media players which have the ability to read/write metadata from sound files, in addition to adding or extracting album art. Your Linux distribution may already include such a program, or you might want to consider some alternatives (e.g. Audacious).