Editing MP3 metadata on a file-like object in Python?

Question

We're generating MP3 files on the fly in Python, and need to edit the ID3 headers in-memory using a file-like object.

All the ID3 libraries on PyPI appear to require you to pass a filesystem path as a string. I find this rather frustrating!

Writing our generated MP3 out to disk (or ramdisk) just to add ID3 tags is unacceptable for a number of reasons, especially performance.

Given the plentitude of ID3 libraries, is there an ID3 library that simply works with file-like objects?

Answer 1

For those finding this answer in the distant future, mutagen, has worked perfectly for me and the constructor for one of its MP3 objects takes either a file path or a file-like object (the docs call it a 'filething').

From https://mutagen.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/filelike.html:

The first argument passed to a FileType or Metadata can either be a file name or a file-like object, such as StringIO (BytesIO in Python 3) and mutagen will figure out what to do.

MP3("myfile.mp3")
MP3(myfileobj)