# Kid3-cli : Simple Newbie Questions

**URL:** <https://discuss.kde.org/t/kid3-cli-simple-newbie-questions/268>\
**Category:** Help\
**Tags:** kid3\
**Created:** [March 28, 2023, 1:53pm UTC](https://discuss.kde.org/t/kid3-cli-simple-newbie-questions/268 "2023-03-28T13:53:45Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![ripman](https://discuss-cdn.kde.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/51bf81/32.png) [@ripman](https://discuss.kde.org/u/ripman)\
**Post date:** [March 28, 2023, 1:53pm UTC](https://discuss.kde.org/t/kid3-cli-simple-newbie-questions/268/1 "2023-03-28T13:53:46Z")

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Hi all.

I have been working with kid3-3.9.3-1-win32-x64 on Win10. Very nice and really good performance too.

I had some simple questions.  
**1 What return codes does kid3-cli return to a command shell (e.g., %ERRORLEVEL% under windows, or $? in unix)?**

**2 Is it possible to use kid3-cli to attach “bigger” images to audio files (e.g., aiff, dsf, wav, flac)? I can attach images that are small (e.g., 100x100), but nothing bigger (e.g., 3000x3000, 8mb). Is there a resolution limit, or a file size limit?**

**3 Is there a json schema definition within the help?** - Couldn’t find it.

**4 Is it possible to pass a json file on the command line with kid3-cli (e.g., no options, just pass a json file with all options/commands/attributes/files)?**  
==\>\>NOTE: I tried creating a very simple json file based on what I saw in the help/man pages. I tried redirecting this malformed json into kid3-cli and it causes an infinite loop. Something like: ‘kid3-cli \<bad.json’

5 UTF-8 seems to work as expected. I noticed the Unicode option for the cli in interactive mode. **Is there anything else that should be considered regarding UTF-8 or Unicode that may not be obvious.?**

So far, so good. Thanks for any help or info. #1 and #2 are most interesting to me right now. (I posted here bc it says the other forum is being archived.)

Best…

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![ripman](https://discuss-cdn.kde.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/51bf81/32.png) [@ripman](https://discuss.kde.org/u/ripman)\
**Post date:** [April 4, 2023, 12:47pm UTC](https://discuss.kde.org/t/kid3-cli-simple-newbie-questions/268/2 "2023-04-04T12:47:49Z")

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I did some research on the closed issues list, and solved #2.

Here is a link to a relevant issue.

> **[KID3 CLI: adding multiple images (with different descriptions) (#464) · Issues...](https://invent.kde.org/multimedia/kid3/-/issues/464)**
>
> Hi there, on Windows, i am trying to add 2 images to an AIF file (ID3 tags): the cover and a second image with the spectrogram. They have...

Here are some sample commands I used that worked. It seems to work best when ID3v2 tags have already been set. No problems adding multiple pictures. No problems with resolution or size limits. Yay.

### The second command will overwrite the jpg from the first.

kid3-cli -c “set picture:‘Front Cover.jpg’ ‘Cover’” 02.aiff  
kid3-cli -c “set picture:‘Booklet Front Cover.jpg’ ‘Booklet Front Cover’” 02.aiff

### Here, both jpg files get written to the target aiff file. Very nice.

kid3-cli -c “set picture[0]:‘Front Cover.jpg’ ‘Front Cover’” 02.aiff  
kid3-cli -c “set picture[1]:‘Booklet Front Cover.jpg’ ‘Booklet Front Cover’” 02.aiff

Thanks.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![ripman](https://discuss-cdn.kde.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/51bf81/32.png) [@ripman](https://discuss.kde.org/u/ripman)\
**Post date:** [April 4, 2023, 1:17pm UTC](https://discuss.kde.org/t/kid3-cli-simple-newbie-questions/268/3 "2023-04-04T13:17:58Z")

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For #1 in the op, I found a closed issue that at least mentions the issue of kid3-cli exit codes.

> **[Status not set on kid3-cli exit? (#471) · Issues · Multimedia / Kid3 · GitLab](https://invent.kde.org/multimedia/kid3/-/issues/471)**
>
> I'm writing a Zshell script to parse the directories in order to write a CSV file. But, kid3-cli does not set the status upon exit. Kinda hard to...

The problem I am having is something like the attached graphic shows. I don’t really care about system related stuff - I can check that before/after invoking kid3-cli - I am interested in knowing that tags were written successfully.

 ![win10_cmd___kid3-cli_and_errorlevel](https://discuss-cdn.kde.org/uploads/default/original/1X/0ec9b2a592a5822528ec2fecd1fe3526a3270f98.jpeg)

Anyways… the journey continues. Pretty cool sw tbh.