[ID3 Dev] ID3v2.5

[Tom Sorensen]

There's that, there's issues of finding the tag (if a tag is variable
length, then it's a lot easier to find it at the start than somewhere
in the tail; not that it's a huge issue anyway). Note that you cannot
put it after the ID3v1 tag -- that violates the ID3v1 standard (which
states that the tag is the last 128 bytes). It must occur before that
tag.

And while I didn't mention this, realize that dropping synchsafe
integers will cause issues. Any older hardware that isn't aware of
ID3v2 tags may treat the tag as audio data, creating static for the
end user. There's a *lot* of devices out there (particularly in-dash
CD/MP3 players and portable CD/MP3 players) that this is applicable
to. Worst case, it could crash the device since the data is very much
not audio data.

Newer devices at least recognize ID3v2 tags at the start of the file
and skip the entire tag body. They're unlikely to skip most end tags
other than ID3v1 (such as APEv2, ID3v2.4 footer, etc) though -- again,
unless they are coded to recognize them. Most aren't.

Tom

On 2/28/06, Jonathan del Strother <maillist at steelskies.com> wrote:
>
> On 28 Feb 2006, at 14:24, Michal Vician wrote:
>
> >> I disagree completely. If this was true, there wouldn't be nearly as
> >> many tag editors, metadata services (with multiple versions of albums
> >> in them), and so forth. Tag editing is certainly frequent enough
> >> to be
> >> a concern. ***Padding is essential***.
> >
> > Well, wouldn't it be better to save id3v2 tag to the end to the file
> > (rigth after the ID3v1)? I'm pretty new to this mailing list (only
> > half a
> > year) and I really can't imagine why is ID3v2 tag stored at the very
> > beginning of file. Can anybody explain, please?
>
>
> I believe this is purely a benefit for streaming mp3s, where you
> don't necessarily have the end of the file by the time you start
> playing.
>
>
>
>
>

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