m-TAGS, the vast majority of this webpage, its specification and the original component are the work of Luigi Mercurio. This is an unaffiliated, unofficial recreation, rebuilt with heavy AI assistance. It may not be as polished as one would hope, as I was probably out of my depth. If that matters to you, the official foobar2000 components page still hosts the original (32-bit only, last updated in 2018)- I hope this restored page is still of use for documentation purposes if anyone wishes to further evangelize this format for other players.

The m-TAGS format offers a simple yet powerful solution to the media-metadata separation problem, which impacts the efficiency of digital music collections and media distribution services alike. An m-TAGS file is media-independent. It just contains metadata (tags) describing a certain media source and a locator which identifies the source to which the metadata applies.

The format of an m-TAGS file is very simple. Each tag is represented by a pair "<tag name>" : "<tag value>", with the special "@" tag containing the location of the media resource. This format allows the definition of any tag name and the assignment of any value to a tag. Support for multi-valued tags is included, as well as for multi-part media indexing.

• For a rationale explaining the need for an efficient media-independent tagging mechanism, see the Media vs. Metadata section.
• For a more thorough description of how m-TAGS files work, see the Overview.
• If you would like to implement an m-TAGS extension for a specific product, you should read the Specification.
• If you are a foobar2000 user (and you should be, if you are serious about your music), then please download the "foo_tags" component.