Remove MP3 watermark

   2014-02-11      Tech      linux · audio · privacy

When downloading mp3s from Amazon they contain a watermark in the ID3 v2 frame “PRIV”. To remove it, you can use eyeD3 (python2-eyed3 package in Arch Linux):

find . -name “*.mp3” -type f -print0 | xargs -0 eyeD3 –remove-frame PRIV

Furthermore, the comment field contains a Song ID. I don’t know which information it provides to the industry, so let’s remove this, too.

find . -name "*.mp3" -type f -print0 | xargs -0 eyeD3 --remove-comment ""

Note, that it is theoretically possible to embed a watermark in the audio data itself, which can even survive re-encoding. The underlying technique is called steganography. As for now, only insiders know if this is the case with Amazon’s music…