Talk:ID3

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[edit] Impending cleanup

I'd like to rewrite this page to make it considerably more readable. I want to explain how ID3 differs from other tagging formats, and why the multiple versions are hard to support at the time, in a less technical manner. Towards that end, if anyone is really attached to the ID3v1 specification or complete genre list please speak up now. IMO they're absolutely stupid; Wikipedia is not a specification archive. piman 06:12, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Internationalization

From ID3v2 section: "ID3v2 supports Unicode so that internationalized tags can be used." What does this mean? --69.212.110.189 22:25, 24 Oct 2004 (UTC)

It means that you can use characters outside the ASCII character set, such as Cyrillic or Chinese characters, in tags. —Lowellian (talk)[[]] 02:44, Oct 25, 2004 (UTC)
Hmm, well can't Unicode be used for ID3v1 as well? If a byte order mark was used for ID3v1, there'd be no ambiguity either. Winamp as well as NOMAD Jukebox on Japanese edition of Windows encodes ID3v2 text in Shift-JIS, so it seems like while the standards blabber on about whatever, actual implementers pretty much ignore it. (iTunes does write ID3v2 tags in Unicode though, however.) I'm not sure how ID3v2 can support Unicode. Actual softwares can support Unicode. The ID3 specification merely says Unicode should be used. --69.212.110.189 23:41, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)
No, ID3v2 says Unicode could be used, you can use ISO 8859-1 as well. However, when using ISO 8859-1, most implementers interpret this liberally, so they take that to mean "the local character set", e.g. Shift-JIS. (Technically that's not legal, but who cares.) If you do encode unicode, this will be signalled inside the tag, ID3v2 provides tag "frames" which can be flagged to be of a certain type. Nixdorf 05:17, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] File tags

I see these mp3 file tag utilities, but are there any similiar utilities for tagging ordinary data files?Thisoldman 02:54, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] 2.4 support

"Despite being over five years old, ID3v2.4 has not seen much adoption. This is likely because the ID3v2 reference implementation still cannot read or write it." That's not really accurate and definitely not NPOV. I'd like to reword it to something like, "ID3v2.4, even several years after the publication of the standard, has been held back by slow adoption by several major applications." Actually I think the only big one application that still doesn't support 2.4 is Windows Media Player. iTunes, Real and the majority of Open Source applications do. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Scott.wheeler (talk • contribs) 14:14, 21 July 2006 (UTC)

This certainly sounds like necessary information. Does anyone have a reliable source for any of it? ~ Jeff Q (talk) 15:27, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
What exactly are you looking for? The article claims: 1) ID3v2.4 has not seen much adoption. If you like, I could go download a thousand files from a filesharing service and see what version they are, but I already know the answer: They will be v2.3. 2) The ID3v2 reference implementation, libid3v2, cannot read or write ID3v2.4. Here's a SourceForge bug about it. The free software programs that do support it use TagLib, Mutagen, or libid3tag; most custom libraries have issues with v2.4. This is far from a majority of programs - maybe a majority of users, now that GStreamer uses TagLib.
WMP still does not support v2.4. iTunes only began supporting it recently (mid-2005, I believe, with 5.0), writes ID3v2.2 by default (according to iTunes), and still has one major bug in synchsafe int handling. foobar2000 only starting writing ID3 tags *at all* in mid-2005. piman 21:57, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
All information included in Wikipedia articles is supposed to be based on existing data from reliable sources. Even if the Wikipedia editors are the people who created the ID3 specification, they should not transcribe their own knowledge into an article on the subject without citing sources, lest the information be considered original research. This may not be intuitive, but it is one of the Wikipedia:Five pillars (part of #1, in fact). In the case I am asking about, we would be looking for any respectable publications (perhaps a Internet music or programming magazine, or official documents from the ID3 website) that make the statements you give above, piman. Citing manuals and/or release documentation for specific software might be done, but this is likely more detail than we need. One would hope that, with an active, worldwide developer community in an extremely fast-growing market, one could find sourceable lamentations on the dearth of support of the latest standards. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 00:13, 22 July 2006 (UTC)
I gave a cite for the main claim of the sentence, that id3lib does not support ID3v2.4. In fact, that is the only substantive difference between the current wording and Scott's. What more do you want? The idea you'll find an issue of DDJ dedicated to ID3 parsers is pretty laughable, you won't find any more respectable sources than release announcements. (And you won't find out about the iTunes bug there either, since Apple's bug tracker isn't public. But Scott can verify it exists.) piman 07:57, 22 July 2006 (UTC)
To flesh things out a bit better: (a) id3lib is not a "reference implementation", it's simply an id3 library. I don't think you'll be able to cite anywhere authoritative that claims otherwise. And even if it was a reference implementation the extension that adoption is connected to such is just speculation. (b) Even if it has been within the last couple of years that 2.4 has seen more adoption, that's different than it not being adopted. Unfortunately the archives for the id3v2 spec mailing list are not on the web, but many of these things have been discussed there. I can push for adding a compatibility matrix to the ID3v2 web site, which would qualify as an authoritative source, but I feel like in the absence of such that the wording I suggested errs on the side of caution. Scott.wheeler 22:31, 30 July 2006 (UTC)
id3lib was the first link on id3.org/implement.html for years, and hundreds of software projects still in use are based on it. After tags have passed through Mutagen or TagLib they must be in v2.4, so I think that's a bad metric to gauge adoption. Does TagLib not get bi-weekly complaints that it "deleted" the tags in a file from a user who is trying to roundtrip tags between WMP/iTunes/id3lib/etc? Mutagen does.
Again, I would like to see a case of someone distributing large amounts of MP3s that have, originally, ID3v2.4 tags. Please note that I'm referring to ID3v2.4 adoption in files. A software matrix that shows only 10% of products without v2.4 support does not accurately convey the fact that that those software products (EasyTag, Windows Media Player, iTunes, old versions of foobar2000) make up 90% of the users. Unfortunately, as you say, the mailing lists are closed and so don't let us make proper citations.
I feel the current passage is accurate. Files do not have ID3v2.4 tags, but increasingly new tools are only writing v2.4. That means, in a few years, files will probably have v2.4 tags. But that is not the case right now. piman 04:56, 27 August 2006 (UTC)
There are still some basic issues here:
  • A reference implementation however has a specific meaning. id3lib is not that. As such, that part of the passage is inaccurate.
  • The percetages above are ad hoc. I would contest them, but neither of us have reliable sources.
  • The original text states that this is because id3lib does not support ID3v2.4; again, that's an unsubstantiated claim. The only major commercial application that I know of using id3lib is RealPlayer and it in fact uses a forked version that does support ID3v2.4. (That I can site if useful; it came up on the Helix mailing lists a while back.)
  • Given that the text as is is about software support, again, I find it odd to claim that it's really about what files actually have. If reworded as "Software adoption for ID3v2.4 has come around in the last couple of years, however the majority of files still use older versions of ID3v2" I probably wouldn't contest that.
I'd like to hear other folks comments on this. It's clear that we disagree, but I feel like in the absense of sources it's still better to make a less authoritative claim. Feeling that the passage is accurate isn't really enough.  :-) Scott.wheeler 01:01, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Vorbis Comments

I'm going to give this one a big, "Huh?" Ape tags happen, but I don't know of any tools that write vorbis comments to (raw) MP3s. If no citation surfaces I'd like to remove that bit. Scott.wheeler 23:36, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

I've clarified what I meant by that paragraph: Few new audio formats have adopted ID3, most use APEv2 (if they don't have a decent container; Musepack, WavPack) or Vorbis comments (if they do; any Ogg format, FLAC). An exception would be True Audio, which does use ID3, but I'm not sure TA is notable enough to mention there.

[edit] PC vs. Desktop

I changed PC to desktop because PC is overused and has a very confused meaning now. It is often used to mean a computer running some version of windows, but originally the word referred to the hardware, which is capable of running, and often does run, many different operating systems. Additionally, music players for desktop operating systems which run on non-PC hardware (think iTunes on the Mac!) are also able to display and edit id3 tags with no problem. Jon Wilson 24.162.120.52 03:23, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Negerpunk

What is Negerpunk [1]? --Abdull 12:24, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] iTunes

I don't think iTunes should be cited in the "Editing ID3 tags" section, otherwise it seems that the most widely accepted way of editing ID3 tags is by using iTunes. I understand that for the majority of people iTunes is _the_ media player, but leaving the article as it is seems like placing a big advertisement in it. Asymmetric 16:50, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

Agreed. I think just saying "audio player" (or "music player") with a link to the comparison page would be preferable. Scott.wheeler 20:27, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Criticism: Playcount

I'd like to propose an additional paragraph for the problems and criticism subsection: the playcount field that was added during the development of ID3v2 (I believe it was in version 2.2). Since ID3v2.3 the tag is called PCNT and, of course, records the number of times the file has been played back. This tag is criticised heavily because it does not actually represent information about the audio file. For example, each time a file is listened to with a player that updates the PCNT field, it becomes to P2P applications or backup software essentially a new file, although technically no change has been made. This results in everyone having a supposedly different file in file sharing networks or file cataloging utilities, depending on how often it has been listened to, and backup software storing these files not every time they have been changed, but every time they were listened to. 84.227.18.173 13:54, 22 July 2007 (UTC) (Anamon)

Actually, reading over that section again, I'd tend towards the opposite direction. I think that criticisms of specific frame types is really too specific for the article. I'd rather generalize it to something like, "ID3v2 has several values that it stores which are problematic when used in day-to-day applications. Examples include [...]" but not jumping into the specific frame names. Scott.wheeler 11:44, 24 July 2007 (UTC)
Okay, sounds good. I think the article should also mention that those tags are not only problematic in practical use, but also theoretically flawed. ID3 is a metadata standard that exists to describe the piece of music it is associated with it. It should be clear to anyone who has a basic understanding of databases that information like "playcount" or "rating" is not actually related to the music, but to a specific listener. 84.227.94.168 (talk) 17:43, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Copyediting needed

Just a note here in case anyone has time for it before I do; this edit was obviously made by a non-native speaker and introduced many gramatical errors. Scott.wheeler 12:45, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Viruses in ID3 tags

I just found out about how virus code can be embedded in an ID3 tag. I'm by no means an expert on the subject but I was surprised there was no ifnormation about this on Wikipedia. Apparently back in like 2002 Windows XP and WinAmp 2.something were exploitable using a buffer overrun technique to execute code from the ID3 tag in an mp3. Both Windows and WinAmp came out with patches to correct the vulnerabilities. With updated software, as far as I can tell, it's impossible for an infected mp3 to infect a computer system, but mp3s can still contain embedded viruses. If anyone has more information, I'd say it would be worth it to include on the article page. --CBecker 06:19, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

That would be a bug in those respective programs and has little to do with ID3 tags themselves. I've also not heard of these (and I expect that I would have...); do you have any sources for this information? Scott.wheeler 11:22, 28 August 2007 (UTC)
Such a bug was found in Winamp in 2005. The term "virus" is rather lurid in this context though. Such code could be anything i.e., "abitrary code". Even if one can assume such code would seldomly do something good, a virus is a rather specific kind of code e.g., it could just as well launch your browser and display some ads which is not a virus. In any case, this issue is more about Winamp than ID3 because it's a flaw in the implementation and not the design. Showing ads in a browser is actually supported by Microsoft and QuickTime which makes that one a design flaw considering that spammers love this feature. Buffer overflows that allow injection and execution of arbitrary code are not uncommon, so basically this will be possible with many software/data combinations. Winamp bug (2005). --217.87.88.52 20:00, 29 September 2007 (UTC)