Remove metadata from an MP3
Voice memos, podcast exports and recordings carry ID3 tags. The obvious ones are title and artist. The one people forget is the comment field — a free-text box that recorders and editing software fill in with anything from a file path to your name.
Audio tags ride at the edges
Unlike a photo, an MP3 keeps its metadata in two places, neither of which touches the audio data:
| Tag | Position | Typical size | Contains |
|---|---|---|---|
| ID3v2 | At the very start, before the first audio frame | 0.1–10 MB | Title, artist, album, track, genre, comment, embedded cover art, and often a "encoded by" or "TSSE" field naming the software and sometimes the account. |
| ID3v1 | The last 128 bytes of the file | 128 B | A truncated duplicate of the above, from the pre-1998 format. |
| APE | At the end, before ID3v1 | Variable | An alternative tag format some encoders write alongside ID3. |
The audio is untouched — removing tags changes the file size and nothing else about how it sounds.
The comment field, and cover art
The COMM (comment) frame is free text. Different tools write different things
into it: some put the original file path, which can include your username and folder
structure; some put a project name; some put nothing. It is worth reading before you send
the file to someone.
Embedded cover art is a picture inside the audio file, and it can carry its own metadata — the same EXIF problem, one layer down. Removing the tag removes it too.