audiodiff¶

audiodiff is a library that can be used to compare audio files. Two audio flies are considered equal if they have the same audio streams and normalized tags.

Examples:

>>> import audiodiff
>>> audiodiff.equal('airplane.flac', 'airplane.m4a')
False
>>> audiodiff.audio_equal('airplane.flac', 'airplane.m4a')
True
>>> audiodiff.tags_equal('airplane.flac', 'airplane.m4a')
False

If you want more, you can get audio checksums and tags:

>>> audiodiff.checksum('airplane.flac')
'ffa0d242f8642b20e90f521a898a0ab5'
>>> audiodiff.checksum('airplane.m4a')
'ffa0d242f8642b20e90f521a898a0ab5'
>>> tags1 = audiodiff.tags('airplane.flac')
>>> tags1
{'artist': 'f(x)', 'album': 'Pink Tape', 'title': 'Airplane'}
>>> tags2 = audiodiff.tags('airplane.m4a')
>>> tags2
{'title': 'f(x) - Pink Tape - Airplane'}

It can be also used as a commandline tool. When used as a commandline tool, it supports comparing audio files in two directories recursively. Audio files with the same name except for the extensions are considered to be compared.

Commandline examples:

$ ls . -R
mylib1:
a.flac  b.flac  cover.jpg

mylib2:
a.m4a  b.m4a  cover.jpg
$ audiodiff mylib1 mylib2
Audio streams in mylib1/a.flac and mylib2/a.m4a differ
Audio streams in mylib1/b.flac and mylib2/b.m4a differ
--- mylib1/b.flac
+++ mylib2/b.m4a
-album: [u'Purple Heart']
+album: [u'Blue Jean']
+date: [u'2001']
Binary files mylib1/cover.jpg and mylib2/cover.jpg differ

Supported audio formats¶

Currently audiodiff can only read FLAC, M4A, MP3 files. They must have flac, m4a, mp3 file extensions respectively.

Caveats¶

Tag reading is done by mutagenwrapper for which there isn’t a stable version yet. It may omit some tags, thus incorrectly reporting tags in files being compared are equal while they are not.

Install¶

audiodiff can be installed with pip. To install, run:

pip install audiodiff

For help using the commandline tool, run audiodiff -h.

Dependencies¶

audiodiff requires ffmpeg to be installed in your system. The path is ffmpeg by default, but you can change it by following ways (later rules take precedence over earlier ones):

audiodiff.FFMPEG_BIN module property
FFMPEG_BIN environment variable
--ffmpeg_bin flag (commandline tool only)

API reference¶

audiodiff.AUDIO_FORMATS = ['flac', 'm4a', 'mp3']¶: Supported audio formats

audiodiff.FFMPEG_BIN = 'ffmpeg'¶: Default ffmpeg path

audiodiff.audio_equal(name1, name2, ffmpeg_bin=None)¶: Compares two audio files and returns True if they have the same audio streams.

audiodiff.checksum(name, ffmpeg_bin=None)¶: Returns an MD5 checksum of the uncompressed WAVE data stream of the audio file.

audiodiff.equal(name1, name2, ffmpeg_bin=None)¶: Compares two files and returns True if they are considered equal. For audio files, they are equal if their uncompressed audio streams and tags (reported by mutagenwrapper, except for encodedby which is ignored) are equal. Otherwise, two files must have the same content to be equal.

audiodiff.ffmpeg_path()¶: Returns the path to ffmpeg binary.

audiodiff.is_supported_format(name)¶: Returns True if the name has an extension that is one of the supported formats.

audiodiff.tags(name)¶: Returns tags in the audio file as dict. It converts tags returned by mutagenwrapper.read_tags by unwrapping single valued items (i.e. without enclosing lists) and removing encodedby tag. To read unmodified, but still normalized tags, use mutagenwrapper.read_tags. For unmodified and unnormalized tags, use the mutagen library.

audiodiff.tags_equal(name1, name2)¶: Compares two audio files and returns True if they have the same tags reported by mutagenwrapper. It ignores encodedby tag.