After I downloaded the Bootie 2006 Mashup album I opened the mp3s in MP3Tag to check the tags and they were all cut off at 30 characters.
I assumed the tags were no good so I hand fixed them and blogged about it. I have had this problem in the past with mp3 tags.
Then the fine folks at BootieSF commented on my blog stating that they were sure the tags should be good.
I re-downloaded the files and started looking at them. I found a shareware mp3 tag editor – Tag&Rename and installed that. It showed that the mp3tags were fine.
It was time to hit Google. I found the ID3.org web site where they manage all the mp3 tag info. Man, there’s a lot of stuff there.
It turns out that ID3v1 is very limited. You get 128 characters at the front of the file and the fields are length limited. This is the format:
| Song Title | 30 characters |
| Artist | 30 characters |
| Album | 30 characters |
| Year | 4 characters |
| Comment | 30 characters |
| Genre | 1 byte |
The IDv2.x format is much more flexible and has a 256MB limit on length. It can go at the begining or the end of the file and can have whatever fields you like in it.
It would appear that the folks at BootieSF are putting both ID3v1 and ID3v2.x tags on the files. I have not found anything that states that you can’t do this, and Tag&Rename doesn’t seem to have a problem with this, but apparently MP3Tag doesn’t like it.
I have registered at the MP3Tag forums and posted a question, now I wait and see.
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I have had a couple of back and forths with the developer of MP3tag and he says that the ID3v2 tags on the Bootie files are bad: “Mp3tag skips the ID3v2 tag because it contains an invalid TCON frame (incorrect frame length).”
I suggested that MP3tag should be fixed to read in the ID3v2 tags anyway and he said “No, I don’t think so.”
So my latest post was:
So it is not your opinion that MP3Tag should help the user by reading in all the ID3v2 tag information it can?
You would rather have reduced functionality and display the 30 character limited ID3v1 tags?
Sorry, I don’t agree. I really like MP3Tag, but a lot of the mp3s that I come across apparently have malformed ID3v2 tags and I’d rather use a program that helped me fix the bad tags instead of throwing away the data that is useful.
So I guess I’ll have to stop using MP3Tag and find something else. Which is a shame, because I really like MP3tag.
I guess I need to find a new mp3 tagging program. The one I downloaded to see what was going on is nice, but they want $30 for it (which isn’t too bad,) but the program isn’t that nice. Any suggestions?
It’s a shame because I really like MP3tag… Maybe the developer will come around.
