Audio files carry far more than sound. A downloaded MP3 typically holds a title, an artist, an album, a year, cover art, and a trail of software fields describing every tool that touched it. Files that came out of an AI music service add their own: a platform name, a version, sometimes a track identifier tied to your account and occasionally the prompt itself. None of it is visible in a player, all of it travels with the file.
Three different tag systems
MP3 uses ID3, which exists in several incompatible versions: an ID3v2 block at the front of the file, a fixed 128 byte ID3v1 block at the very end, and sometimes an APEv2 tag squeezed in between. WAV, being a RIFF container, stores its metadata in a LIST INFO chunk, though many taggers instead drop an entire ID3 block into a chunk of its own. FLAC uses Vorbis comments, the same key and value system as OGG, with cover art in a separate picture block.
Reading it without touching it
This viewer parses those structures directly from the bytes. It decodes ID3 text frames in all four of their encodings, including UTF-16 with a byte order mark, which is what confuses most simple readers. It reads the description part of comment frames so you can see which tool wrote which note, and it lists the container layout so an unusually large block gives itself away immediately.
When you find nothing
An empty result usually means something already stripped the file. Streaming exports, messaging apps and many distribution pipelines rewrite audio and drop the tags on the way. That also means the presence or absence of tags proves nothing about the origin of a track: it only tells you what survived the journey to your disk.