Hello.

I came across Hydrogen Audio last week and have found lots of brilliant information but I have a few questions i was hoping people could help me with.

Ok. I have been tagging my MP3s with MP3TAG for the past year or so but have read concerns on the board surrounding ID3v2.4 over 2.3. I just checked and I have tagged my collection in 2.4.

In September 2008 should I still be concerned and convert all my tags to 2.3 or are compliance issues a thing of the past?

I currently use Windows XP (sp3) with Winamp for listening and Itunes/Ipodshare for syncing my Ipod. I appear to have no problems at the moment but could there something be lurking in the background?

All my tags also have an embedded ID3v1 tag which I gather is why I have never noticed an issue with Explorer seeing tag info [UTF-8 issue?]

So I guess I want to know...

...the advantages of ID3v2.4 over ID3v2.3 and any issues I may have taking into account I am thinking of experimenting with Foobar2000 and maybe eventually migrating from Winamp.

...what the real world advantages/disadvantages of using UTF-8 over UTF-16 are.

...if Foobar can literally use every standard 2.4 frame in its Media Library.

Also does anyone know of an up to date list comparing media players and their support for ID3v2.4 frames [official and unofficial (ITUNESCOMPILATION)]. I have found this...

http://www.mp3tag.de/en/help/main_tags.html

...which is really helpful but doesn't include Foobar and what version of Winamp & Itunes they are referencing. For example, I know from using Winamp that it currently supports DISCNUMBER [TPOS].

Sorry for rambling on and look forward to everyone's advice...

Only problem I have is my car stereo doesn't support V2.4 or UTF-8/16 encoding so I stick to V2.3 and ISO-whateveritis.

If your player can read the v2.4 tags, you can use them if you want. Foobar has no issues with v2.4, it even uses v1+v2.4 as default tagging scheme.

My Creative ZEN doesn't read v2.4 tags so i have to stick to v2.3 (UTF-8) (why is Creative so slow with this... not to mention the format support in general )
So far i didn't see any difference between UTF-8 and UTF-16 tags, so i don't know what UTF-16 is for.

iTunes has a huge bug in its implementation of id3v2.4 that makes it effectively useless. You might not run into it if you don't embed album art, but if you do, a large percentage of your files won't be readable in other players unless they emulate iTunes' bug.

Thanks for the replies so far.

Benski do you have any specific details regarding this bug? Is it still an issue in the latest Itunes because when I search for information regarding ID3v2.4 and itunes I can only find threads which are from 2006? Is/was it only an issue when you edit(ed) tags within Itunes? I say this because at the moment I embed artwork in MP3TAG and import my library to both Itunes and Winamp with no noticeable problems? What should I be looking for?

Thanks again