[ID3 Dev] ID3V2 tag length

Tom Sorensen tsorensen at gmail.com
Tue Jan 3 08:14:08 PST 2006


ID3v2 Tags are variable length, but you'd be very hardpressed to beat
ID3v1 in size -- ID3v1 tags are always 128 bytes. Most ID3v2 tags are
much larger than this, and are often padded out to 2k or 4k in length.

That said, you're not going to see much savings from worrying over tag
lengths -- even if you assume that each ID3v2 tag is 2k in size (much
of which is padding, and unlikely to be stored by your player), then
you'd have to have 1000 songs to save 2 MB of disk space.

If you only use ID3v1 tags then any long song/album/artist names will
be chopped at 30 characters and you'll be limited to the predefined
genres.

Tom Sorensen

On 1/3/06, Ray MONK <waymoraro59 at malloway.fsnet.co.uk> wrote:
>
> Congratulations on your excellent site!
>
> I have recently updated my Creative Jukebox from 6GB to 40GB in order to
> store more MP3's. I understand that the tags are held in RAM and therefore I
> wish to keep the tags as small as possible in order that I may store the
> maximum number of songs. Presumably the RAM holds the TAG details plus the
> disk address where the song is stored. Can anyone tell me (please) if ID3v2
> are variable length records as opposed to v1 which appear to be fixed
> length.
> Any info would be appreciated'
>
> Ray
>

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