From what I thought I understood, vorbis comments would write much more quickly than id3 tags. This doesn't seem to be the case at all, vorbis takes about 2x the time that id3 tags are written in. Why is that?

It's because Vorbis comments are added at the start of the file, hence the whole file needs to be rewritten if the comment is larger than before. I think they designed it in such a way to support streaming (tags can be read before the audio).

One way to prevent the re-writing is to use John33's oggenc2.3 and use the pad option. When it makes an ogg file, you can pad out the comment header to 4 kB.

Is it possible to set paddin using OggDropXPd?

Vorbiscomments are not at all faster to write than id3v1, but they could be somewhat faster to read, because seek to the end of file is not required.

-Eugene

I don't remember a padding option in OggDropXPd. Perhaps you should suggest that to John33

Not done currently, but I'll add the option in the next release.

Is there a way to add padding to already existing Vorbis files? Does oggenc have an option for this?

Already existing files? I don't think so. However, I'm sure a simple tool can be written to pad the files. It would probably involve extracting the Vorbis stream and writing it to another (padded) Ogg container. But the effect is still the same....the whole Ogg Vorbis file will need to be rewritten to disk again. I guess 4 kB doesn't make much difference in the end so padding should be recommended in all encodes, I'd say.