Does it reallly matter? It seems like with 4KB (not sure if this is the problem) reads on iTunes as for a song that's tagged as um

The Shins (as artists)
Kissing The lipless (as song) will be read:

The Shins (as artist)
The Shins - Kissing the Lipless (as song).

anyone know how to correct this?

The only time I have ever had that sort of problem happen is when I used a "-" instead of a "/" when naming the tracks in EAC. Those were various artist CDs though...

The padding shouldn't effect the the tag fields though. As I understand it, the padding of a ID3 tag is merely there to prevent file corruption.

How are you tagging your files though? Are you using additonal command line options and having Lame tag it? Or are you having EAC tag your files?
J

I'm not familiar with iTunes, but id3v2 tags should just take longer to write if you run out of padding (because then they have to rewrite the whole file to make room for the extra info).

Having said that, 4kb is HUGE unless you have an album cover or something stored in the tag. My files are all padded to 512bytes, which is plenty. Think characters - how many characters are you storing in the tag? Title/Album/Artist/Track#/Year/Genre should all probably fit in about 200 bytes! 4kb isn't huge though as far as storage, so you don't really need to change it - I'm just saying there is no way you're running out of space.

I've had problems with both LAME and EAC tagging. But recently, all the rips I do when setting LAME to tag in id3v1+id3v2 (not just ONLY id3v2) works perfectly so far. If anything fails, I will report from there.

I wonder why this method is more effective?

The padding is there to prevent having to rewrite the entire file when changing the tags (since the tag is at the beginning). You can just edit it in place instead.

I use nearest-4k padding myself, but I also store album art in the tags.