With all the recent CoolPlayer development, it's hard to remember there was almost a seven-month gap between versions 205 and 206. But apparently Niek and Marcus are still in the heat of a development frenzy, as evidenced by today's release of CoolPlayer 210. Here's what's new:

- M.

http://coolplayer.sourceforge.net/phorum/r...f=4&i=333&t=333



That is what one of the Coolplayer devs wrote. Good luck to those that use OGGs with Coolplayer.....

... and as one of the other posters in that page noted, "a spec is a spec." I agree that OGG tagging support (as per spec) is a necessary addition, but frankly I'm not certain the reluctance of the developer to implement it is any different, better or worse than foobar 2000 users being expected to adopt APEv2 tags for their MP3s. :x

- M.

Here's the difference, ID3V2 is well known to break formats by being written in front of the file, APEV2 doesn't because it's not retarded and it's written at the back of the file like ID3V1. By adding ID3V2, you're effectively breaking the Vorbis format.

Don't forget, the ID3V2 has many other stupid and retarded stuff, it's a wonder why ID3.org managed to get their shitty tagging schemes into MP3 in the first place.

Sounds like you've absorbed a fair amount of the anti-ID3v2 propaganda (and if you bothered to use the search function in the forum, you would have been aware that I've explained the physical location of the tags several times, to newbies and information seekers). ID3v2 - when properly applied and not abused - is not well known to "break" any MP3. When overloaded with images or a thousand lines of unnecessary text it is liable to choke your decoder/player, but that is due to the difficulty of full compliance with the ID3v2 spec; it is not due to a broken MP3, since simply stripping the prepended information from the audio (and again, this depends on your player/decoder being able to properly handle this function) will leave the original MP3, as encoded.

Some view having their tags at the end of the file as an advantage; I do not. Remember, OGG/Vorbis/FLAC tags are also written at the front of the file, and APEv2 tags can be similarly positioned. Writing tags at the end of a file is the quicker, more convenient method... but as a solution it is far less elegant, and requires additional, unnecessary seeking to be properly displayed in CD-based hardware devices.

The "wonder" is that half the people bashing ID3v2 have never used it, and only mimic what they have seen others spout.

- M.

I guess you haven't seen what Monty wrote in that thread?



Even Frank Klemm has written some "why not to use ID3V2" reasons, I'm sure it's still somewhere in the forum here, I'll see if I can dig it up.

Never used it? Hello? I had a VBR MP3 file with a nice ID3V2 tag that somehow overwrote the XING VBR header, causing a nice effect of not knowing what the bitrate and time length in most players.

Don't blame the tag, the issue there is surely a bad tagger.

Just kill the tag and run VBRfix in the file.

Give me a little credit. I read the entire thread to which you linked, including Monty's statements. Let me be a little more clear, since you seem to misunderstand my intent: I do not advocate the use of ID3v2 tags on anything other than MP3 files. Would I recommend anyone use them for OGGs, or MPCs? Of course not; the respective specs for each stipulate a separate tagging format. MP3 has no "default" tagging format, and both ID3v1 and ID3v2 are in this respect "hacks." They are, however, the most generally used and acceptable hacks applied to the format.

Lots of people in this forum have written their own lists of "why not to use ID3v2 reasons," and I've read most of them (so you can save yourself the trouble of quoting references, unless you are simply trying to place everything in one easy-to-use thread). The list of people writing such reasons range from respectable characters all the way down to uninformed zealots; Frank's reasons are his own, and not mine.

Once more, lest anyone misunderstand, ID3v2 is only for MP3.

Sorry to hear about your bad experience with an overwritten VBR header. May I ask with what software/version your ID3v2 tag was written? There have been innumerable faulty implementations, leading to the logical assumption that the format is inherently flawed. (It is poorly managed and often abused, but despite this internally sound.) One of these may have been responsible for your difficulty. If you would care to test the ID3v2edit universal ID3v2 editor version 2.0 available from AudioCoding.com, I believe you will find the implementation to be properly managed, and "dangerous" fields (such as embedded pictures/encryption/general encapsulated objects) are not available to the user.

- M.

Edit: Cleaned up miscellaneous spelling errors (mine ).

about the player:
- is there RG functionality hidden somewhere?
- can this thingy play MPC's/FLAC's somehow?
(there is no single mp3 on my hd anymore)

tia

p.s. would be nice to explain such 'basic' stuff with inside the news imho.

It seems to be able to use winamp2 input plugins, although they don't make that very clear in the documentation. I put in_wv.dll in the same directory as the player and it worked fine (although it doesn't add the filetypes for selection and I couldn't find any way to configure the plugin).

If I recall correctly, plugin configuration is done by creating an INI file with the same name as the plugin, and putting the configuration lines within it. (Meaning for "in_wv.dll," you would simply copy and paste the appropriate lines from "winamp.ini" or "plugin.ini" to "in_wv.ini".) I'm not where I can double-check this at the moment, though.

- M.

Thanks, M, that makes sense. In this case I should be able to just copy the in_wv.dat file from the winamp plugins directory to the CoolPlayer directory and the setting(s) should follow it.