APE tags in MP3s: the way forward, What is FB2K evangelists' current thinking? Options

[sergeymen]

If I remember correctly, several years ago the attitude here on HA/FB2K forums was that ID3v2 was a messy spec (and prescriptive and poorly implemented in most software). Which is why foobar2000 pushed APEv2 as a simpler alternative.

Now there seems to be a push by Peter to get FB2K's ID3v2 implementation right, and at least one key feature (embedded album art pictures) is available via ID3v2 but not via APEv2. My entire mp3 library is very neatly tagged in APEv2, and now I am beginning to wonder whether I am behind the times. The reason I use APEv2 is for consistency and simplicity. I am less concerned about other application support. As I have noticed in recent changelogs, the mapping of fields (e.g. album artist) to various ID3v2 frames (e.g TPE2) may change over time. So some files in my library may end up with different tagging schemes as a result. This is exactly what I am trying to avoid, and this is why I want to stick to the simplicity of APEv2. The field you see is the field you get.

Is further development of FB2K's MP3 APEv2 implementation abandoned in favor of ID3v2? I am especially curious to hear Foosion and/or Peter's opinion on this, and of course others too. If such development is not abandoned, do you think support for embedded album art pictures via APEv2 is a possibility?

[Peter]

If I remember correctly, several years ago the attitude here on HA/FB2K forums was that ID3v2 was a messy spec (and prescriptive and poorly implemented in most software). Which is why foobar2000 pushed APEv2 as a simpler alternative.

ID3v2 is a horrible standard and its popular implementations are pretty bad as well. However, ID3v2.3 is the best thing for the general userbase as it guarantees compatibility with most if not all of the mainstream software (as long as we don't use ID3v2.3 features that various software chokes on).

The reason I use APEv2 is for consistency and simplicity. I am less concerned about other application support. As I have noticed in recent changelogs, the mapping of fields (e.g. album artist) to various ID3v2 frames (e.g TPE2) may change over time. So some files in my library may end up with different tagging schemes as a result. This is exactly what I am trying to avoid, and this is why I want to stick to the simplicity of APEv2. The field you see is the field you get.

Note that whenever I introduce changes such as different mapping of some tag field, a backwards compatibility mode toggle is added so you can restore the old behavior if you do not wish to alter your tagging scheme.

Is further development of FB2K's MP3 APEv2 implementation abandoned in favor of ID3v2? I am especially curious to hear Foosion and/or Peter's opinion on this, and of course others too. If such development is not abandoned, do you think support for embedded album art pictures via APEv2 is a possibility?

APEv2 implementation development is not abandoned, simply because there's plenty of other formats we support that also use APEv2 tags. It's just that so far I've not cared to specifically implement embedded picture editing for MP3 + APEv2. I will do that at some point.

[sergeymen]

Thank you very much Peter for your comments!