How to find the bitrate of an mp3 file via command line?

Question

What is the terminal command that can used to find the bitrate of an mp3 file?

Is there any other option available other than mpg321 -t name.mp3?

Answer 1

Simply put:

file song.mp3

Note: file is included with Ubuntu.

---

For alias lovers, insert this at the end of your ~/.bashrc file:

bitrate () {
    echo `basename "$1"`: `file "$1" | sed 's/.*, \(.*\)kbps.*/\1/' | tr -d " " ` kbps
}

Open a new Terminal window. You may now run the following command:

bitrate song.mp3

Answer 2

You can install the package libimage-exiftool-perl:

sudo apt-get install libimage-exiftool-perl

Then run:

exiftool -AudioBitrate GoldLion.mp3

It will output something like:

Audio Bitrate : 192 kbps

Answer 3

Install mp3info package

sudo apt-get install mp3info

To find the bitrate use

mp3info -r a -p "%f %r\n" *.mp3 

will give the info you need, also has some other useful functions man mp3info for more info

Answer 4

MediaInfo is further solution to do that (not only on mp3).

sudo apt-get install mediainfo

Example:

mediainfo Aphrodite_-_Superman_\(dnb\).mp3 | grep "Bit rate"

Output:

Bit rate mode                            : Constant
Bit rate                                 : 192 Kbps

Another Example:

mediainfo Aphrodite_-_Superman_\(dnb\).mp3 | grep 'Bit rate  '

Another Output:

Bit rate                                 : 192 Kbps