id3 tag editors and implementation

The forum for petitions, theoretical discussion, gripes, or other off topic discussion.

Moderator: James Steele

Forum rules
The forum for petitions, theoretical discussion, gripes, or other matters outside deemed outside the scope of helping users make optimal use of MOTU hardware and software. Posts in other forums may be moved here at the moderators discretion. No politics or religion!!
Post Reply
baytonemus
Posts: 17
Joined: Sat Mar 26, 2005 10:01 pm
Primary DAW OS: Unspecified

id3 tag editors and implementation

Post by baytonemus »

I'm about to begin preparing several hundred audio files for a download site. I realized that I didn't really know much about how artwork and other info is associated and/or stored with audio files so I've been researching that today.

I'm wondering if anyone has thoughts and or recommendations regarding various tools to edit the tags associated with MP3s and other audio files. Seems as though id3 is a/the standard but I guess I'm not sure if there might be others as well. I've been trying to find out which version of that standard is currently supported by iTunes 7 and other popular players.

I do have Peak Pro 5.2.1 and understand that Peak6 has enhanced capabilities in this regard. I'm not sure I'm ready to drop $169 bucks for an upgrade just to get that feature when I could buy another app for $15-20 that will do the same thing.

Any thoughts or recommendations welcome. Thanks.

JAY
User avatar
AlMacMeister
Posts: 136
Joined: Sun Feb 25, 2007 12:38 pm
Primary DAW OS: MacOS
Location: Way out, way out, that's where the fun is...

Post by AlMacMeister »

Use iTunes. It's free and does the job just fine, especially for mass tagging.
baytonemus
Posts: 17
Joined: Sat Mar 26, 2005 10:01 pm
Primary DAW OS: Unspecified

Post by baytonemus »

Yes, that's an appealing solution because of its cost. However, can you confirm that the iTunes-created tags are readable by a wide variety of other players? I'd really like to know more about issues of forward-backward compatiblity for the standard. I've heard that there are some quirks in Apple's implementation including their use of a compilation tag that is not part of the standard.
User avatar
AlMacMeister
Posts: 136
Joined: Sun Feb 25, 2007 12:38 pm
Primary DAW OS: MacOS
Location: Way out, way out, that's where the fun is...

Post by AlMacMeister »

For my purposes, I just checked the iTunes created tags using (demo versions of) Snapper, Pathfinder, and Audiofinder. They all seemed to recognize the tags just fine. From my observations, iTunes can write extra tags other than the standard id3 tags, but that didn't seem to cause any problems from what I saw. I suppose I could've checked the tags with something like winamp, wmp etc on a pc if I wanted, but it was good enough for my purposes.

Maybe try digging around id3.org? (just found it now). Looks like lots of info there, but too much for me!
baytonemus
Posts: 17
Joined: Sat Mar 26, 2005 10:01 pm
Primary DAW OS: Unspecified

Post by baytonemus »

Thanks for your reply. I actually started at id3.org before posting here and elsewhere. There is more technical information there than I'm able to utilize with my limited level of geekdom, but I think it helped me ask more informed questions.

For what it's worth, it doesn't appear that iTunes is using the most recent version of the id3 standard which is 3.2. I think they're still using some form of v2.
Post Reply