Support for ID3V2.4 Tags

[kweller]

Title says it all really, I'd like to see dAP/dMC/MMC support ID3V2.4 tags.

[Spoon]

Re: Support for ID3V2.4 Tags

It is a bit of a still born standard if you ask me, goto id3.org and click the id3lib link to sourceforge, that does not support id3v2.4

[kweller]

Re: Support for ID3V2.4 Tags

It's early days though isn't it?

Some taggers, apart from MusicBrainz, are already supporting it - ID3-TagIT, iTunes, Jaikoz and Magic-Tagger are 4 I've tried although I confess I didn't think much of the last 2.

When I asked why MBz was using 2.4 I was told it was UTF-8 which pushed MusicBrainz down that root as there are people on there who want to see Cyrillic, etc. data in the tags.

[Spoon]

Re: Support for ID3V2.4 Tags

2.4 was proposed over 3-4 years ago.

>UTF-8 which pushed MusicBrainz down that root as there are people on there who want to see Cyrillic

Considering 2.3 supports Unicode-16 (the full version) that argument is silly, they should convert utf-8 to unicode-16 (which is really easy) and it will work with all id3v2 programs which can read unicode.

[kweller]

Re: Support for ID3V2.4 Tags

Yep, I've had that discussion .

The conversation then got far too technical for me as people started discussing things that were beyond my understanding.

Someone suggested UTF-16 wasn't as well supported as UTF-8 or UCS-2 because the format is not independent of the 'endian-ness' of the underlying platform. There was some discussion about how accurate that statement was then someone else said UTF-16BE tags were not acceptable to Windows Media Player (which apparently suggests you remove the tag 'as it is corrupt') but UTF-16LE tags were. At that point I beat a strategic withdrawal!

The MBz tagger will actually write ID3V2.3 UTF-16 tags but it's not the default and, as I had no idea at that point it was going to cause me problems, I went with the default of ID3V2.4 UTF-8.

[kweller]

Re: Support for ID3V2.4 Tags

Having had a think about this I'm going to re-do the tags as ID3V2.3 as not having an easily accessible database of my tracks is a PITA. That's going to take me a long time as there doesn't seem to be anything around that will just convert the 2.4 tags to 2.3 and retain the MBz data (iTunes is supposed to be able to but doesn't seem to do it reliably, i.e. after 'conversion' many tags are still 2.4).

Before I do this please tell me you're not about to bring out a version of MMC that will process 2.4 tags!

[Spoon]

Re: Support for ID3V2.4 Tags

No 2.4 unless it appears in the id3lib (which hasn't been touched for years, also I took me a whole day just to get it to compile correctly in VS 2005).

>UTF-16BE tags were not acceptable to Windows Media Player (which apparently suggests you remove the tag 'as it is corrupt') but UTF-16LE tags were

That is just microsoft being microsoft, any self respecting program will detect BE and swap the bytes to make LE, not rocket sience.

[kweller]

Re: Support for ID3V2.4 Tags

Would you believe that because of a lack of spare time I have only just finished converting these - it took a while! dAP is currently busily transferring about 10k tracks from my local HDD where I did the work to the Linkstation - that's taking a while as well.

While on the subject of ID3 tags will a future release of dAP make better use of the tags so, for example, ratings and multiple genres are stored in the tag not just in the dAP database?

[Spoon]

Re: Support for ID3V2.4 Tags

Yes