How to compare mp3 programmatically

Question

I like to be able to compare mp3’s programmatically. The problem I don’t know by what. Header? Histogram? channels? Does anyone have experience with this subject?

Answer 1

I wrote my master's thesis on audio fingerprinting. The thesis lists a few open source solutions to the problem of comparing what the music sounds like, and provides performance comparisons between them. Might be overkill, but there are some really decent applications out there.

If you only want to compare by tagged data, the standard to look into is ID3. There are basically two versions, the first is very simple (ID3v1) and consists of a 128 byte block at the end of an MP3. ID3v2 puts a larger, variable sized block at the beginning of the MP3.

Answer 2

It looks like Chromaprint would do what you're looking for. It transforms PCM data in audio fingerprints which you can then use to compare.

They have a C API library (it's actually written in C++, though), a python front end, and also some utilities to convert the results in JSON which means you could use another language to manipulate the data. I don't think that they provide the compare function itself, though.

Also if you're using a Linux system, it's likely that you will find a package for it.