How to remove ID3 audio tag image (or metadata) from mp3 with ffmpeg

Question

FFMPEG is really a great tool. I know it can edit ID3 tags and even remove all tags in a row :

ffmpeg -i tagged.mp3 -map_metadata -1 untagged.mp3

But even after that, there's still the cover image.

I don't know how to remove it using ffmpeg. I know there's other soft out there that can do the job - like eyed3 - but what's the point to install it if ffmpeg can do it too, in one line, while encoding the audio ?

Answer 1

Strip metadata tags and remove album cover image

ffmpeg -i input.mp3 -map 0:a -c:a copy -map_metadata -1 output.mp3

• -map 0:a Includes only audio (omits all images). See FFmpeg Wiki: Map for more details.
• -c:a copy Enables stream copy mode so re-encoding is avoided.
• -map_metadata -1 Omits all metadata.

Answer 2

I've tried to use codes provided by LordNeckbeard, none of them worked for my case. But this one worked:

ffmpeg -i tagged.mp3 -acodec copy -map 0 -map_metadata 0:s:0 notags.mp3

It shows now only one tag, 'TSSE' (means Encoder).

Answer 3

None of the above worked for me but the following did:

ffmpeg -i tagged.mp3 -write_xing 0 -id3v2_version 0 untagged.mp3

Answer 4

I tried llogan's solution with a small castle.mp3 file and found out that its size increased from 4448 to 4797 bytes! Further inspection in Audacity revealed that the signal has been slightly "delayed" as well - however the length of the file [castle2.mp3] remained the same.

After that, I used id3v2 -D castle.mp3 to delete all mp3 tags from the file, and the filesize went down to 4320 bytes, with no other noticeable (undesired) changes.