So here I'm sitting and tagging all my mp3's with tag&rename and then I read some people just want to get rid of the ID3's. What's the reason for this? Are they destroying your mp3's in som sort of way? Checked all songs with Encspot and some other program and I don't get any bad frames. sync errors etc. Please tell me what to do - stop or continue. Thanks.
/Mingus

I think the original thinking behind people boycotting ID3 tags was due to incorrectly reported track length information for VBR encoded MP3s.

Earlier versions of Winamp and many other software MP3 players failed to read VBR information from the header of the MP3 correctly, or at all, if there was and ID3 information before it. Some still do (MS WMP for example).

It is discussed in length at r3mix.net. As with most static pages on that site, the information is a little out of date now, but it's relevent in this situation: http://www.r3mix.net/noid3.htm

Personally (with the new versions of Winamp at least) I've experienced no problems with VBR files, ID3 tags, and track length reporting.

As far as I know, ID3 tags do not, and more importantly cannot, affect sound quality of MP3s.

ID3v1 was never claimed to be the mother of all evil... id3v2 was however...
The problems are:
* the time/seek problem
* gapless playback problem (well...mp3 itself has problems with this)
* no backward compability as far as I remember
* Player compability - far from all software/hardware players support id3v2 tags. And if they do they often don't support all version (such as idv2.3 and idv2.4)

More issues are noted in the noid3 page though I personally only agree that the points I just listed are valid issues.

Thanks for the replys. So I guess I'll continue this project if the only problems are concering gaps and sometimes timreporting which I've never experienced myself. Most important to me is that it's not affecting the sound quality.