I'm investigating the subject. I've written a couple of low-cost applications for radio stations. A music scheduler/playlist creator, and a player system which utilises the Winamp player. The software doesn't currently use any tagging system because it supports so many audio formats and it would take too much work to support all of them.

The software utilises the filename to obtain the artist & title. I now would like to store this info and additional custom info against every song. One option is to use a database, but the simplist option is to insert the info in each file.

I recently added Money's Audio support into my freeware WinVorbis app, so I already have code to read APEv2 tags.

So my thought was to use APEv2 tags on all files. The files will not be used for sharing or streaming directly. So the question is: Will most players handle extra unidentified data at the end of the file so that it does not affect the audio output?

Cheers,
Ross.

Have all my music files (mp3, mpc) tagged with ID3v1 and APEv2 tags (both on each file), and so far have never encountered a problem in any of the players that I have used so far (Foobar, Winamp 2.X, Winamp 3 and I just tried WMP for the fun of it). Although some players don't handle APEv2 tags perfectly yet (Winamp Media Library, etc) in terms of reading Metadata, I have never encountered a problem with the sound quality.

I don't know about Vorbis files, afaik they need their own tag standard. Am not sure though, since I hardly use them.

The best way to really find out would probably be, If you would take one file of each type that you want to use. Then use "tag" to add APEv2 tags to all of them and try out in different players.

Since ID3v1 and APE tags are both at the end of the file, which one comes first? I think ID3v1 needs to be the last 128 bytes.

Ross.

Am not really 100% sure right now, but I think that depends in what order you use the tag commands for putting in the respective tags. On my files tag reports them in the following order. APEv2, id3v1, Am not sure wether Tag reads the tags from front to back or back to front.

You could just try tagging two different files with TAG.

Use "tag --force ID3v1 ---force apev2" on one of them and "tag force apev2 --force id3v1" on the other and recheck them with TAG afterwards to see wether it reports the Tags in a different order.

I'm pretty sure it does, in my experience. Depending on the order of the tag command, the Id3v1 tag will either be read, or not read, by winamp 2. It needs to go last to be compatible.

Putting an APEv2 tag on an Ogg file will probably corrupt it.