This is just something i bumped in too.

A friend of me just encoded a track for me and transferred it to my server. I listened to it immediatly and was almost blasted away on my headphones because he didn't replaygain the track.

So the first thing i did was fireing up replaygain. Replaygain started calculating and stopped with the message 'not a mpc sv7' (or something like that), so i checked the file info dialog in winamp and saw 'streamversion 7'. I also saw that the file was tagged with id3v1.1, and then i remembered he always uses id3v2 also (with mp3 that is).

I used 'tag' to remove the tag and indeed it was tagged with id3v1.1 & id3v2. After that i could replaygain the track without problems. Problem probably comes from the fact that id3v2 sits before the rest of the data ?

And just out of curiousity the other way around: Is the replaygain data overwritten when you add an id3v2 tag ? I can't check this because i don't have an id3v2 tagger (and i don't want one also !).

Yes, this is the problem. All the tools assume streams to be intact and expect header to be in the beginning of the file.


Fortunately not. If tagger works it writes ID3v2 in a new file and then appends the MPC after it so the file won't get corrupted.

Ah ok. thanks for the info. mpc files should be unplayable that have id3v2 tags attached, so that people don't attach them no more. They only seem to cause trouble.

p.s. Why do i see spase's name when i do 'tag *.mpc --nfo' when there are no tags written to the file. Where does that information come from ?

Spase needed an .nfo file generator and I made him one . Tag 2.0 will let user create nfo file templates so names will be gone.

That's why i couldn't find a template hidden somewhere in the .cgf files.

Why you don't tag your system DLLs, your word documents, you Powerpoint presentations, your
Excel sheets. You are one of these tagomaniacs tagging files, dogs, cats and cars.

Very funny Frank, but i'm not a tagomaniac, thank you. It was a track i got from a friend, like i told in my first post.

For the record: I just started using tags with the coming of ape tags for mpc.

Heh, this is funny in a way... IIRC, ID3v2 ignoring on playback was introduced in pre-APE-tag days upon the request of some people, so they could process ID3v2 tagged files with their favorite tools.

Only ID3V2.4 tags with desynchronization without
footer are ignored. ID3V2.2, ID3V2.3, ID3V2.4 without desynchronization, ID3V2.4 with footer
and a lot more from the zoo of ID3V2 tags are currently not skipped properly. ID3V2 is
really nasty thing.

Some older decoders try to skip ID3V2 without any
knowledge of these tags by searching the start of
the basic file. But this was too slow if the
ID3V2 tags were larger than 2...3 kByte.

ID3V2 is for MP3, if it were better designed
(size always a multiple of 4) maybe also for MP2.
Don't tag other files with it, you damage these
files.

I know I have been pushing for id3v2 skipping since before APE there was not really an alternative to me (though I saved the tags in tag-files (the tag written to a file instead of the audio file)).
but about APEv2.

is it defined yet?
what can you have in APEv2?
newlines?
pictures?
formatting?
character limitations?

Answering in order:

Yes, http://www.uni-jena.de/~pfk/mpp/sv8/apetag.html
Text and/or binary data
Yes
Yes, but don't add BLOBs in tags.
Don't think so but I'm a bit unsure.
Yes, it's using UTF-8 and thus has its limitations. But IMHO, it is the best alternative out there right now.

/Erik

As far as I can tell it is.


All of the above is possible and there are no character or legth limitations, except item names can contain only ASCII values 0x20 - 0x7E (space to '~', includes numbers and letters). I know there is no tagger yet to insert pictures but maybe Winamp plugin allows this someday.

as far as I understood it was not completely defined yet. isn't that true?

There were some open issues couple of months ago, but they are now defined. I can't find anything missing anymore.

so can APE2 be considered a closed standard now?
I ask because my favourite tagger is thinking of adding APE2 support but will not do it till it's defined completely.

So why the workaround with skipping tags ?



Detect the id3v2 tag, and put up a information dialog: "id3v2 tag detected, not supported for mpc. please remove it" and do not playback the file.

Yes. It should be safe to support it.