How to compare mp3 programmatically

Question

I like to be able to compare mp3’s programmatically. The problem I don’t know by what. Header? Histogram? channels? Does anyone have experience with this subject?

Answer 1

I wrote my master's thesis on audio fingerprinting. The thesis lists a few open source solutions to the problem of comparing what the music sounds like, and provides performance comparisons between them. Might be overkill, but there are some really decent applications out there.

If you only want to compare by tagged data, the standard to look into is ID3. There are basically two versions, the first is very simple (ID3v1) and consists of a 128 byte block at the end of an MP3. ID3v2 puts a larger, variable sized block at the beginning of the MP3.