I have been searching the forum for a while and have not been able to find this information. When using the lame command line to tag mp3's, which version of ID3v2 is it tagging with? 2.3? 2.4? Is there an easy way to find out which version an mp3 is tagged with? FYI, I'm using 3.97b2.

Also, Hopefully this isn't too much of a noob question but, what is the usefullness of padding the tags (--pad-id3v2)?

Thanks in advance, and sorry if I just missed it in my searching...

Lame writes ID3v2.3 tags. Padding (insertion of null-bytes) is used to speed up further tagging.

Hey, thanks very much for the info. I was having a terrible time trying to figure out the version. Good to know for compatibility issues.

So I assume what happens is when you write a tag and don't pad it, the next tag will be written immediatly after the previous one, and then if you change the tag it will have to shift all the data after it to accomodate the tag edit. Correct?

Thanks again!

Yes, a tagging application will need to overwrite entire file to add new data (in case no padding is written beforehand).