Hi!

I don't like wasting space. In v0.8.3 there was an option to write Tags without padding. Where has it gone in 0.9?

Greets

wasting space??? it's 1kb not 100 gb

You are not wasting space, you're saving your harddisk's life. A 2k padding is not really significant, for example if you have 10.000 mp3s on your hdd you're actually "wasting" 20 megs.
Just imagine one day you decide to add replaygain information to all your files and without padding foobar will need to rewrite almost 100 Gbyte of data instead of a few megabytes.
Padding is not an issue on portable players too, on a 20G player you won't save place even for a single song.

(my rough calculations may be wrong, i had always problems with basic math )

To your question, i don't know about a way to disable padding in 0.9 and curently i see no reason for implementing it

2Ks of zeros are 2Ks of zeros. For me they are useless. I am sure that I will never use them. So for my needs it's wasted space. Of course you may find padding useful for yourself but it is not for me.

Heh. Well, you've been told why padding is a good idea, but nobody answered your question, so I'll go ahead: the option is gone. I'll even be bold and predict the next two posts where you ask: "Can it be brought back?", and a dev replies: "No way in hell". From that point the conversation can either wither away or turn into a complain-fest (see: "Accidentally wiped out my collection" thread).

I don't want to be insulting at all but maybe you should go out or something? I'm sure you're wasting far more than 20mb in other places...and anyway, its 20mb.

Yeah like your file system's cluster size for file allocation! Every file written could be potentially wasting precious bytes!

On a serious note, foobar2000 uses the ID3v2.4.0 standard if I'm not mistaken. ID3v2.4 structure documents clearly state that padding is optional, so I don't think this is a stupid request. It might not be a needed feature, but that doesn't mean it isn't a valid request. Perhaps an option in the Advanced preferences under tagging? Of course the developers always have final say, and I'm not sure how hard this would be to add anyway.

Padding would be useful if I wrote tags again and again.

But, I don't.
Info does not change after I rip, replay gain, and tag.
They get written once and remain static.

Why would I need padding to make future tagging faster?

Oops, that's twice right there. Once for the ReplayGain, again for the tagging. Still twice if you do it the other way around.

Even if you tag the source audio tracks before you convert, that's still one tagging process after the conversion, then a second after ReplayGain scanning the resulting files. The process of tag updating would need to be significantly complicated to "queue" multiple updates into a single write operation, and on top of that, it would complicate the existing confirmation dialogs.

Hey, his point still stands. ;P

Yes, if he doesn't want padded tags, he should use APEv2 and/or ID3v1 for MP3 files, which will always be on the end of the file. Oh, and MPEG-4 tagging at the end of the file, which may not be compatible with iTunes and some other taggers, but won't use any padding either.

Unless rewriting the files a couple of times after ripping is preferred to wasting a few KB or less per file. After all, those kilobytes do add up to megabytes once you start creeping into the thousands of files.