A voice memo names the person and the device
Recordings exported from phones and DAWs carry the artist field, the software, sometimes the account name. A leaked draft with your name in the tags is harder to walk back than one without.
Remove metadata from audio files
An audio file names more than the artist: the tagging library that wrote it, the machine that mastered it, sometimes the original studio session and a cover image. Broadcast WAVs carry an originator name and time reference in a separate chunk, and MP3s can hold two tags at once. This tool removes the metadata blocks and copies the encoded audio untouched, so the file does not lose a single sample.
- No upload
- No account
- No re-encoding
- Free
Input0 bytes uploaded
Engine
File API
Runs in
Web Worker
Needs account
No
What an audio file carries
01Each container stores tags in its own block. None of them are needed to decode the audio, which is why they can be removed without touching a single frame.
- Artist / album artistID3 TPE1/TPE2, Vorbis ARTIST, RIFF IARTmedium
- Title, album, year, genreOrdinary descriptive tagslow
- Encoder and tagging librarye.g. Lavf62, LAME 3.100 — names the toolchain and its eralow
- Comment and user textFree text, often a client name or a session notemedium
- Cover artAn embedded image, sometimes a photo of the master sheetmedium
- LyricsUSLT in ID3, occasionally an entire working draftmedium
- ID3v1 trailerA 128-byte duplicate tag after the audio datamedium
- Broadcast extension (bext)WAV only: originator, origination date, time referencemedium
- M4A iTunes atomsArtist, album, tool and cover art in the MP4 containermedium
Why it matters.
02Broadcast WAVs were built to describe themselves
The bext chunk is a production tool: it records who supplied the audio, when, and with what time reference. That is exactly the data you do not want attached when the clip goes to a public podcast feed.
Cover art is a second file you did not choose to share
Embedded pictures can be anything from album art to a photo of a printed script. They travel with the audio into every app that displays artwork.
Removing tags is not re-encoding
Tags live in container blocks, before or after the encoded frames. Removing them is a copy operation: the same MP3 frames, the same FLAC stream, the same PCM samples, byte for byte. Duration, bitrate and loudness do not change.
How to use it.
03- Step 01
Drop an MP3, FLAC, WAV or M4A file into the panel. It is parsed in a Web Worker on your device.
- Step 02
Check the tag list. Artist, comment and cover art are usually the ones worth removing.
- Step 03
Download the cleaned file and play it once. The duration and waveform are identical — only the tag block is gone.
One caveat.
04Before you rely on it
Two tags, one file
MP3 can carry an ID3v2 block before the first frame and an ID3v1 block in the last 128 bytes. Cleaning one and leaving the other is a common mistake — the artist name is still there. This tool removes both, and reports the second one as its own field so you can see it was found.
Limits worth knowing.
06- MP3, FLAC, WAV and M4A are supported. OGG, Opus, AIFF and WMA are not yet.
- ReplayGain, ReplayGain 2 and Sound Check values are tags too, and are removed with everything else — some players will then play the file at a different volume.
- Chapters and cue sheets inside a file are content, not tags; FLAC cue sheets are kept.
- Burned-in metadata (a spoken slate, a watermark in the waveform) is audio, not metadata, and is left alone.
- Very large files are limited by browser memory: 100 MB is the working ceiling here.
Questions people ask.
07Will the audio quality change?
No. The encoded audio frames are copied unchanged; only the metadata block is removed. For a lossless FLAC or WAV file that means the samples are bit-identical.
Does it work on files from Audacity, Logic or Adobe Audition?
Yes. Those tools write standard ID3 or Vorbis comments depending on the export format, and the encoder field is usually the clearest fingerprint of which one was used.
Why is my file only a few bytes smaller?
Metadata is small compared with audio. A one-minute MP3 is around a megabyte; the tag block is a few hundred bytes. A large drop usually means an embedded cover image was removed.
Can I remove metadata from a whole album at once?
Not yet. Batch processing is on the roadmap; this version handles one file at a time and shows you exactly what it found before you download.
Is the file uploaded?
No. The container is parsed and rewritten in a Web Worker on your device; the network panel shows no request carrying the file.
Files are processed on your device. Erasemetadata cannot read them.MP3 · FLAC · WAV · M4A