How do I correctly get a .mp3's Album/Artist data?

Question

Recently I have started a personal project to make a media player in Visual Basic .NET I am trying to get the Album data and Artist data from a .mp3 file, and in many different ways, it has failed. Here is my code I am trying to use but always returns blank:

miniMusic.currentMedia.getItemInfo("Artist")

When I use that property for my application in the way of:

Label1.Text = miniMusic.currentMedia.getItemInfo("Artist")

It returns blank. I made sure it was the actual returning data that was blank by doing:

Label1.Text = "Artist: " + miniMusic.currentMedia.getItemInfo("Artist")

To see the label's text only say "Artist: " when I invoked that code. (Apologies for bad terminology here!)

How can I, correctly, obtain the song file's data and display it in my Visual Basic .NET application?

The only data I was able to display was the title information from the currentMedia.getItemInfo("Title").

I made my own .mp3 file in Audacity and made sure to include the artist name (John) and album title (Laffin' on sunshine (Not a real album!) And my application still cannot find this data. Am I doing it incorrectly or is the media control unable to find this data?

Answer 1

Those tags are id3 tags (id3v1 or id3v2 and the like). I had to use a 3rd party tool to pull them off the mp3 file.