Hello,

Anyone able to help me understand ID3 tags a bit better?

I am using Autoflac to rip my cds to Flac and it's doing it fine. However, in the setup read me file, it says to disable the ID3 tag function in EAC.

I don't know much about ID3, but if at a later date I want to convert some of those Flac files into MP3s or anything else, aren't those ID3 tags important?

Also, when I play those Flacs in Winamp, what info is Winamp displaying? Isn't that from the ID3 tag? And when I make any changes to that info using Winamp, is it actually changing the file info, or just a database that is exclusive to Winamp?

As you can tell, I really don't know what I'm talking about here!

FLAC uses Ogg Vorbis style tags as the tagging standard as defined by its author, not IDv1 or IDv2 tags. That is likely why IDv2 tags are being turned off for FLAC files in the EAC setup README/instructions. Winamp displays Ogg Vorbis tags for FLAC files. Hope this helps. Maybe someone can give more help about tagging with EAC as I don't use that program.

For more about FLAC tagging see this recent thread where I tried to answer a similar question:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....c=50002&hl=

Uncheck the "Add ID3 Tag" checkbox on the External Compression tab in EAC. FLAC has its own tagging mechanism (Vorbis-Comment) and ID3 tags technically break FLAC rules. Some programs read them anyway but it shouldn't be expected. As far as converting to other formats and displaying info in your player, they will be using the Vorbis-Comment.

If you want to know more about the internals check here.

Ok, thanks for all that. A couple more questions, though. Can you change and edit these Vorbis tags in Winamp, or do you need to use another programme?

Also, when I do convert from Flac to MP3, will the converting software safely be able to read the Vorbis files, considering they would be less standard that the IDV tags?

Quite a lot of players/taggers can read and edit Vorbis comments, including foobar2000, MP3tag and also Winamp, although the latter doesn't support masstagging. You can only edit the tags file-per-file using it.



Talking of "less standard" doesn't make much sense in the case of FLAC, since Vorbis comments are the only available official standard for this format. If you're referring to ID3 being "more standard" because of MP3's popularity, please don't forget that ID3's supported only by few further formats, like WavPack, OptimFROG and Monkey's Audio, as shown in the Lossless Comparison Table. ID3v1 is also very limited and ID3v2 is known to be completely unreadable by many hardware players, especially ID3v2.4 tends to cause problems. But if you really insist on tagging with ID3, then think about using one of the lossless codecs I mentioned above instead of FLAC.

And yes, a good converter is able to read the Vorbis comments and transfer them to MP3's ID3 tagging scheme. At least foobar2000 and Winamp do so, although Winamp doesn't transcode to MP3 without paying for the Pro version.