I have a bunch of free Ogg Vorbis audio files that I've downloaded from Kahvi.org. They're great! But recently they've been including cover art within the files, which breaks Windows Media Player (it can't handle the very long tags of binhex-coded JPGs).

Since I rather like WMP's integration in windows (keyboard shortcuts), and Amarok isn't quite ready for win32, I thought I'd find a way to strip the troublesome tags from the data files rather than change to another player.

Here's a quick-and-dirty shell hack to remove the tags from the files and get them playable by daft players such as Windows Media Player

#!/bin/bash

###############################################################################
#
#   File:       fixvorbis.sh
#   Language:   Bash shell script
#   Time-stamp: <2008-08-26 15:48:45 tzbblg>
#   Platform:   N/A (requirest ogg Vorbis tools installed)
#   OS:         *nix
#   Authors:    Michael Lockhart [MJL]
#
#   Rights:     Copyright © 2008 Michael James Lockhart, B.App.Comp(HONS)
#
#     This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or
#     modify it under the terms of th e GNU General Public License as
#     published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the
#     License, or (at your option) any later version.
#
#     This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
#     but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
#     MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
#     GNU General Public License for more details.
#
#     You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
#     along with this program.  If not, see .
#
#   PURPOSE:
#
#     Script to strip out COVERART tags from ogg vorbis files (these
#     tags break certain players...)
#
#   HISTORY:
#
#   MJL20080826 - Created.
#

# extract the comments, less the COVERART tags
# (keep the art in separate files)

for n in *.ogg; do
    echo "Extracting comments and COVERART from $n"
    vorbiscomment -l $n | grep COVERART > $n-art.txt
    vorbiscomment -l $n | grep -v COVERART > $n-comment.txt
done

#if there's a comments patch (stored in patch.txt in the current dir)
# then apply the patch to the comments.

if [ -f patch.txt ]; then
    for n in *-comment.txt; do
	patch $n patch.txt
    done
fi


# edit the comments with new comment files, minus art, possibly patched.
for n in *.ogg; do
    echo "Replacing comments in $n"
    vorbiscomment -c $n-comment.txt -w $n
done

#clean up
rm *-comment.txt

# clean-up of art is manual. There might be different cover-art from
# each file, but if not (diff a*-art.txt b*.txt etc produces no
# output) then just remove all but first and rename it...

The smarts are all in the vorbis utilites included as part of Cygwin. Specifically the script uses vorbiscomment₍₁₎ to extract and apply tags in the Ogg files, and grep and (optionally) patch to manipulate the comments.

Enjoy!

P.S. My Wordpress stylesheet is doing weird things with the margins and this is really badly formatted, sorry. You can copy/paste into a text editor just fine though...