I'm trying to organize my music collection and reign in its incongruous id3 tags to make my iPod easier to navigate.

I've done research via google and HydrogenAudio's forum search, but I can't draw a conclusion on a few points about tagging. I need an athoritative "do this" or "don't do this" to be comfortable with my decision.

The questions:
1. Do id3v2 tags (Aside from v2.4) still have a huge stigma surrounding them? Should I use them, and if so, what precautions should I take when tagging?

2. If I store album art in each file, I'll be able to view it on remote computers when listening to music via iTunes, but it adds more data to the file. Is the risk worth it, or should I just settle for folder.jpg's? Chances are I won't look at the art often, but it'd be nice to have, and if it's just as safe as id3v2's, I might as well. If it poses a higher risk though, I'll drop them.

3. Should I tag with very specific genres or general ones (a la my file hierarchy), as in, should something be tagged "trance"/"eurodance"/"rave" or just "techno"? I'm more looking for opinions on this one than anything.

Thanks,
-DanWSB

Really, it all comes down to personal preference.

Generally, most peeps around here stay away from ID3v2 tags for a number of reasons. Use the forum search funtion for ID3v2.

I use ID3v2 exclusively, but I'm in the minority. Most new hardware supports it anyhow and it holds more (descriptive) data.

BTW, you can put a relative file path in the cover art tag. Meaning it's just a path to the cover art and the jpeg itself isn't imbedded into each file. Over the course of many mp3's that might make an impact.

ID3v2.4 finally got synchsafe integers in place for the entire tag, so no possibility of false synch patterns. However, ID3v2.3 enjoys far more popular support than ID3v2.4. I'd generally recommend against embedding cover art into the ID3v2 tag and leave it in the folder as a JPG.

I use cover art also and it is a very nice thing to have inside some of your files.
Also ID3v2 is extremely simple to detect and skip if you are a player ( it is the year 2003 ? isn't it ) maybe some ancient players did have problems for a few days until they posted an update ages ago to handle the then newly found ID3v2 tags.
So if you like it use it IS a standard and it IS supported by all players. If there are still players out there having trouble with ID3v2 it more or less a personal decision not to provide support for them some reason .

And how about ID3 v2.4? Supported on most? Not supported? Benefits?

ID3v2.4 should be immune to false-synch problems, but unfortunately it suffers from a definite lack of widespread support. For example, Winamp 2.91 still doesn't read ID3v2.4 (and all the fb2k enthusiasts replied "foobar does!" )

v2.4 was much hated and ignored and with good reason...
It changed a lot old standrard field names like the one that holds the year and a few other, it added a hell of a lot more complexity and sync safe integers all over.
But it is the same as 2.3 in the most part and it is easy to make a 'leap of faith' B) to the first frame of audio data.

ID3v2.4 didn't strike me as particularly hard to support (once ID3v2.3 support is in place already).

For reference, the danger with ID3v2.3 is with data frame that are of a size that falls within one of these three ranges:
65,504 - 65,535 bytes
16,769,024 - 16,777,215 bytes
4,292,870,144 - 4,294,967,295 bytes
The ~4GB range should be a non-issue because the ID3v2.3 tag itself is only capable of handling ~256MB of data. And having ~16MB of data in an ID3v2 tag would be strange, to say the least. However, ~64kB of data is not unusual at all - a cover art item could easily be that size and generate a false synch pattern.

Hang on a minute though - I just realized that ID3v2.4 is frame-level unsynchronized, but ID3v2.3 is tag-level unsynchronized, so the 32-bit non-synchsafe integers are unsynched if neccesary anyhow, so ID3v2.3 is perfectly synchsafe. Silly me! B)

How is this done? Is it a feature of the playback program, or embedded into the ID3 tag somehow. Would like to know how to do this in iTunes rather than add all my Album Art to each file's Tag.

I usually have jpg album art in the same directory as the music files already.

This is part of the ID3v2 specs , instead of actually embedding the image file you can place a link to it.
The 'how' part is tricky because you have to track down and find a program that supports this feature and in a practical way.

That makes sense, is parsing this information supported by most programs that can also display cover art?

Any idea what programs can add these tags, or what the tag format is? I don't suppose I could do this with Frontah?

edit: well I think I found the info on the formatting at least - from ID3.org



So it should be:

To get back a little bit to the original question



I like the way CDDB2 has their genres setup. There are 25 "metagenres" with over 200 subgenres. I tend to classify everything to one of the main genres unless it really doesn't fit well or belong. 25 genres is not too cumbersome, and having subgenres alows it to fit within a more specific genre within one of the main genres if needed.

Take a look a Paul Oakenfold and CDDB2 for example :



I could classify him as "House", or if I don't have any other house artists then maybe just under the main "Electronica" Metagenre

Some artists are really hard to classify to one genre or any predifined genre though.