How-to
Add album art and edit the tags on an MP3
A file transfer, a burned CD rip or an export from an old app often arrives with a blank cover and the wrong title in your player. The tag editor fixes that without touching the audio: it drops a JPEG or PNG into the file as the embedded cover, updates the text fields you edit, and writes the result with a stream copy, so the sound is bit for bit the same file you started with.
Step by step
- Open the tag editor and drop your MP3 in. If it already carries ID3v2 tags, the form pre-fills whatever it can read: title, artist, album, track number, year and genre.
- Edit the fields you want, then attach a JPEG or PNG as the cover. A square image around 500 to 1000 pixels a side is what most players expect, but any size is accepted.
- Run it. The tool writes the tags and the cover with ffmpeg's stream copy mode, so no audio decoding or re-encoding happens; download the tagged file and drop it back into your library.
What ID3 tags are, and where the cover lives
The title, artist, album, track and genre a player shows you are ID3v2 text frames stored right inside the MP3 file, right before the audio data: TIT2 for the title, TPE1 for the artist, TALB for the album, and so on. The cover art is a different kind of frame, APIC (attached picture), that embeds the image bytes directly in the file rather than linking to it. That is why a cover added this way still shows up after you copy the MP3 to another device or app: it travels with the file, not with the folder it came from.
Why editing tags does not touch the audio
Some online taggers decode the MP3 to raw audio and re-encode it to write the new tags, which quietly re-compresses the sound and can shave off a little quality even when nothing about the music changed. This tool runs ffmpeg with `-c copy`: it maps the existing compressed audio stream straight through untouched and only rewrites the small metadata block around it, plus the cover frame when you attach one. The audio samples in the output are identical to the ones in your original file.
What the editor can and cannot read or write
The tool only accepts MP3 input, because ID3 is the tag format MP3 players use; a WAV or FLAC needs its own container's tagging approach. Cover images are limited to JPEG and PNG. Pre-fill from an existing file is best effort: it reads the common text frames (title, artist, album, track, year, genre) but not the comment frame, so a comment already on the file will not appear in the form even though the editor can write a new one.
The tools used in this guide
- MP3 tag editor (ID3)Edit MP3 ID3 tags (title, artist, album, cover…) in your browser. No upload.
- Audio converterConvert audio to MP3, WAV or AAC directly in your browser. No upload.
- Extract audio from MP4Extract the audio track from your MP4 videos as MP3, without server-side conversion.
- Audio cutterCut a clip out of an MP3, WAV or M4A right in your browser: fade in/out, ringtone preset. No upload.
Frequently asked questions
Does adding a cover re-encode the MP3 and lose quality?
No. The tool writes tags and the cover frame with a stream copy (`-c copy`): the compressed audio data is mapped straight from the input to the output without decoding it, so the audio bytes are unchanged. Only the small metadata block around the audio is rewritten.
Can I add album art to a WAV or FLAC file the same way?
Not with this tool: it only accepts MP3 input, since ID3 is the MP3 tagging format specifically. Convert the file to MP3 first with the audio converter, then tag the MP3 copy; a WAV or FLAC needs its own container's tagging approach instead of ID3.