I am happy to announce the immediate availability of version 0.9.0 of JiaId3. The big change in this version is support for Ogg/Vorbis (.ogg) audio files. I have also seriously cleaned up error handling and added some architecture to support more audio file formats as I learn about them.

JiaId3 0.9.0 can be downloaded from:

http://chipmunkninja.com/download/JiaId3-0.9.0.dmg

The source code can be downloaded from:

http://chipmunkninja.com/download/JiaId3-0.9.0.src.tar.gz

About JiaId3

JiaId3 0.9.0 is an information tag editor for your audio files. It currently supports editing the ID3 information associated with MP3 files, as well as the tag information associated with Ogg/Vorbis .ogg files. I will add support for more file formats as I approach version 1.0.0. I first sat down to write this application when I found a directory on my hard disk with a bunch of “junk” MP3 files whose tag information was all messed up. Instead of throwing them all away, or having them mess up my audio libraries, I set about to write an application to let me fix them.

If you’ve got a pet audio file format you’d like to see added, drop me a line and I’ll see what I can do to add it. Bonus points if you know of any libraries or documentation that help dissect the files.

JiaId3 is a remarkably complicated application to use, so please read through this sophisticated documentation carefully.

Installing JiaId3

JiaId3 is a Universal Binary, so it (should) work fine on both PowerPC and Intel Macs. I don’t actually have an Intel Mac here, so if you have one and could let me know that it works, I’d hugely appreciate it.

JiaId3 uses Objective-C exception handling and thus requires OS X Panther (10.3.9) or greater. I quickly loaded the program once on a friend’s Panther machine and saw some weird stuff, but didn’t have the time or environment to further track down. If anybody has a Panther machine and could help me see what’s up, I’d appreciate it.

• Double Click on the .dmg file you downloaded.
• Drag the JiaId3 application to your Applications folder or from wherever you’d like to run it.

Opening Files for Editing

When JiaId3 by itself, all of the controls are disabled until you open an audio file to edit its contents. To do this, you have two choices:

You can drag and drop the file onto the JiaId3 application and it will automatically open the file You can click on the File/Open menu and open an audio file that way. Note that when launching JiaId3 you can actually specify an audo file on the command line to be opened initially:

open /Applications/JiaId3.app/ ~/SuperFunkay.mp3

Navigating to Other Files

Once you have edited the ID3 information in an audio file, you can use JiaId3 to navigate to other files in the same directory. This is done by click on the “next” and “prev” buttons in the top right of the application window. If you have any unsaved changes in the current audio file, it will first ask you if you’d like to save these before navigating to the next file.

If you are unhappy with your changes at any point before you have saved them, you can always click on the “Reset” button and the file will be reloaded to its saved state on disk.

Localisation

JiaId3 is currently (mostly) localised into French, and I’m working on Italian, German, and Simplified Chinese support.

For even these languages, however, I will require some help for some of the more descriptive error messages: If you are fluent in any language other than English and would like to help out by localising about 20 text strings, please contact me at marcwan@chipmunkninja.com.

Source Code

JiaId3 is open source under the BSD license.

Those sneaky folks at GNU almost got me with the Ogg support – a lot of the code there is LGPL, and I was worried I would have to link it directly in. This would have required the more restrictive (L)GPL license, but I found a way to link the code strictly in library format, which means the rest of the code base can remain BSD.

Comments, Suggestions, Bugs?

Got a problem with the program? Got a feature request, or have found a bug? Please send me an email with as much detail as possible, and if possible any files that caused the program problems to me via E-mail at marcwan@chipmunkninja.com.

Building JiaId3 takes a bit of effort, because I worked hard to keep GPL code out of it. These directions assume you know how to use /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app. If you do not, you should really question whether you want to be building JiaId3 from source ….

So, you have to download:

1. libogg
2. libvorbis
3. vorbistools
4. libid3

Unpack them all and then for each one of them, in order, execute the following command line:

env CFLAGS="-O -g -isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk -arch i386 -arch ppc" \
  LDFLAGS="-Wl,-syslibroot,/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk" \
   ./configure --prefix=/Users/marcwan/src/tmp --disable-dependency-tracking --enable-static --disable-shared

Please note that for libvorbis, you have to add --with-ogg=/Users/marcwan/src/tmp and for vorbis-tools you have to add that and --with-vorbis=/Users/marcwan/src/tmp.

I used /Users/marcwan/src/tmp as the final installation directory for all four libs because I don’t plan on using them except to build JiaId3, so I’d like an easy-to-delete directory when I’m done with them.

I also only built with static libraries as I don’t want to burden people with having to ship around additional .dylib files. This way, the final application contains everything needed to run JiaId3. Once you’ve configured a given package:

make && make install

Next, you’ll have to go into Xcode, “Get Info” for the JiaId3 target, and under the Build opens, change the include paths to include /Users/marcwan/src/tmp/include and change the library search path to include /Users/marcwan/src/tmp/lib.

You should be good to go.