Reading (and writing?) audio file tags

[Paul Moore]

I'd like to write some scripts to analyze and manipulate my music
files. The files themselves are in MP3 and FLAC format (mostly MP3,
but FLAC where I ripped original CDs and wanted a lossless format).
I've no idea what form of tags are used in the files (ID3v1, ID3v2,
OGG, APE, ...) I just used whatever the program that set them up used.
I'm completely confused by the various tag formats that exist - there
seems to be little standardisation, and quite a few compatibility
pitfalls. For example, I have files with tags using accented
characters - I suspect that this causes some tools to switch format
(because I've seen what looked like corrupt data at times, which
turned out to be the program displaying the "wrong format" of tag).

I've seen various Python libraries that talk about ID3 tag reading -
but I'm not clear if they read other tag formats (many applications
which call themselves "ID3 readers" actually handle multiple formats,
but I don't know if that's true for (Python) libraries. Also, there
seem to be few libraries that will *write* tags.

Is there a good "music file tag handling" library for Python that's
worth looking at? I use Windows, so it would have to be for that
platform, and although I have a compiler, I don't really want to spend
a lot of time collecting and porting/building support libraries, so
I'd be looking for a binary distribution.

In the absence of something suitable, I'll probably go back to dumping
the tags via a generic "MP3 tag reader" program, then manipulate them
as a text file, then try to do some sort of bulk reload.

Thanks,
Paul.