Maybe I've missed something in the documentation, but does the latest version of LAME have the ability to write tags such as Band (TPE2) or Disc Numer (TPOS) when encoding?

I'm writing a small script to transcode a Flac library to MP3 and wondering why I need to find a commandline tagger to have this basic capability. Is there a line of reasoning behind why only the most rudimentary tags are supported?

At the moment it is not possible to add any arbitrary ID3v2 tags. There is some pending patch from nyaochi I'll eventually commit. The power of commandline tools is, have specialized tools to solve a problem and combine several to do larger tasks. LAME is good for encoding, Tagging tools are good for tagging.

Robert,

Thank you. I look forward to seeing this capability added to LAME one day. I guess my logic runs like this: the ability to write id3v1 and id3v2 tags is obviously already a part of LAME, so adding the flexibility to write other tags would be mostly just a matter of extending the options to allow specifying other tags.

The few taggers that I've found so far that can be run from a script and the command-line, as LAME is run, are somewhat lacking. Maybe the creation of a "MetaLAME" program would be a worthwhile offshoot of the project, similar to MetaFlac in the Flac project.

What about metamp3?

Yes, another vote for tycho's excelent metamp3 tool. This tool just totally rocks and not only does it support writing any TXXX frames you need e.g. "Album Artist", but it also uses strings to write the ID3v2 "Genre" tag, so that we don't need lame.exe's "--ignore-tag-errors" switch anymore and the extra work of changing those "Other" Genre tags to something else. Also you can ReplayGain scan your MP3 track files which adds ID3v2 RG tags in the same format as fb2k, or instead change the global gain fields of the MP3 frames directly to get player support everywhere. Finally, you can also list the contents of LAME's INFO tag.

IMHO, this tool has been long overdue, and i can't thank tycho enough for combining these excelent and well-known sources/libraries i.e. mp3gain, id3lib and EncSpotConsole together to one single awesome command line tool.

CU, Martin.

nyaochi's extensions to the LAME font end were brought to my attention through discussion of his CueProc application. I have performed some preliminary tests with his LAME build including the enhancements and, so far, they have performed flawlessly.

As someone who maintains a lossy, parallel collection for use with iPods/iTunes, I would be very interested to seeing both the user-defined ID3v2.3 frame and Albumart (APIC ID3v2.3 frame) patches committed to CVS and having the functionality available in the 3.98 alpha builds.

Digging up a very old thread... Is this capability now built into the LAME 3.98 beta binaries available at RareWares?

http://www.rarewares.org/mp3-lame-bundle.php

Since 3.98b4:

Thank you. That's good news.

Can TXXX frames also be defined in some manner?