Does a plugin exist for Winamp, or any other player for that matter, where it allows external tags? Kind of like what .cue files do for nogap compilation cds.

Is it even possible? Just thinking in my head, it seems, from a coding perspective, to be much more reliable and easier to maintain. There's no changing of the data in the actual music file, instead it just reads it from the external file. It'd be easier to allow for longer character limits (not so much now, but when id3v1 needed longer character limits, and they implemented v2), international character sets, lyrics, pictures, even sfv/md5 checksums could be written into it. There also wouldn't be problems like those awful tagger programs that screw up the VBR header (or whatever happens when you use a bad tagger and the bitrate rises slowly until the end of the file [i don't even know if any exist anymore]). You wouldn't have to write and rewrite a file every time you changed the id3v2 tag either.

I'm certainly not a coder, but wouldn't it be easier for a developer such as Winamp to write a plugin that reads data instead of actually embedding it? You could have a file with the parameters something like

album=
<filename>=
<filename>.artist=
<filename>.lyrics=
<filename>.insertSpecificInformationFieldHere=
...
picture=

<start picture data, and write a decoding function to decode whatever text is here into a viewable image>

The only possible downside I could see of doing something this way is if a) you downloaded an album and the extended information file was missing. But in most cases of encoding, there's usually enough of a naming scheme to figure out what the file is. If you downloaded something like 01 Hi.mp3, chances are you knew what you were downloading, and could write (using a program, or by hand) your own extended info file. Also, I suppose it would pose a problem for peer to peer applications, that only let you search for files of certain extensions. You'd technically never be able to get the file, unless it was named one of those extensions...

So ... is there such a plugin, and if so, where can I get it, and if not, why hasn't one been made already? Or is there some serious limitation to external vs internal I'm neglecting to realize?

I thought about external tags some time ago when I was a tester at helium2.
The author made it possible to, from helium2, export the tags to files.
The files were the raw tags with the same filename as the audio file but with different extension of course.
The plugin ear, by the same dev, can read these tag files.
If he hasn't updated it this can only be done with id3v1 and id3v2 though (helium2 supports ogg tags now also but I haven't seen an ear update since I think - don't use it anymore).
Anyway it seems that noone was really interested in this so support from plugins were never available.
Maybe someone will be later I don't know I certainly like the idea of external tags.

http://www.helium2.com
http://www.helium2.com/ear

It would be nice to have a feature like this on players and portables because it will keep the original music untouched (albeit maybe normalized, but otherwise the same as the original rip). It would be much easier to fix in a jam, and could be mass edited much more quickly. If I had a player that supported some sort of this external tagging with my mp3s, the only other feature that i would require is track-seeking for full album rips encoded in VBR mode. I know that mp3cue does this for CBR, but I use alt-preset standard, and mp3cue does not support VBR seamlessly or even close to seamlessly. MP3s do not have seamless play built in automatically, and it would actually be easier to manage an album as one file for myself anyway, but that's not an option right now. Maybe mpc support in portables would be an option for me, but thats not there either, at the moment.