Read ID3 Tags of an MP3 File

On macOS, use ffprobe to read metadata from an MP3 file.

Install FFmpeg

This procedure uses Homebrew. If Homebrew is not installed, follow its installation instructions first. Then open Terminal and run:

brew install ffmpeg

The FFmpeg package includes ffprobe.

Read the tags

Run this command. Replace /path/to/file name.mp3 with the path to your file. Keep the quotation marks if the path contains spaces.

ffprobe -v error -show_entries format_tags -of json "/path/to/file name.mp3"

The command shows metadata that ffprobe can read. It does not modify the MP3 file. See the ffprobe documentation for more options.