I'm using Kid3 because it shows extended tags that mp3tag doesn't, but one other thing I noticed for the same songs is that Kid3 is reporting some songs as MPEG-1 Audio Layer 1 while Mp3tag is reporting it as MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, so I'm at a loss to figure out which program is showing the correct information.

In fact Mp3tag doesn't show any MP3 I have in my collection as MPEG-1 Audio Layer 1 while Kid3 does. Since I see this difference in Kid3 I tend to believe it's showing something Mp3tag isn't.

Here are some screenshots:

Kid3 showing a song as MPEG-1 Audio Layer 1



Mp3tag showing the same song as MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3



Any thought here?

THANKS

After looking at the screenshots, I see that besides codec, bitrate and length are not the same as well. Have you checked which one shows correct bitrate and length?

I get the feeling he's playing around with illegally obtained files again.

Best advice is buy the CD and rip them yourself or buy the tracks from a reputable seller. This way you know what you're getting.

Of course bitrate is incorrect if one of the programs identifies the wrong layer. The MPEG frame header contains a pointer to a table entry that holds the bitrate and the tables differ for Layer I and Layer III. I guess Mp3tag is correct since Layer I would be *.mp1 and I don't know why one would encode a file using such an ancient encoder. I was just about to ask where you could even download a Layer I encoder but then remembered ReallRareWares.

Why not double checking with Mr QuestionMan?

Just out of curiosity, I tried Kid3 with MP3s I made from my CDs.

It shows all my VBR MP3s as MPEG Layer 1, with wrong bitrate, length and sampling rate.

I would say Kid3 is an inferior application, and should not be used anymore.

I assume that the Kid3 application may be troubling by some ID3 tag in front of the mp3 data. If william could confirm that he uses ID3V2, then it would be for sure.

My bad I didn't have id3v2 checked in the settings. Also Kid3 uses libraries id3lib and Taglib to read, and using id3lib isn't giving correct results so I used Taglib instead and it's better, but then Kid3 and mp3tag do show slight differences, like Kid3 might say the bitrate is 210 and mp3taq will say 211 and song durations between the two applications will show differences of a few seconds. So at this point in time I'm not sure if Kd3 is all that accurate or not.

Right, I only use ID3v2 because of Unicode support.

Why not use one more tool, e.g., foobar2000, for confirmation?

After changing to TagLib, Kid3 would show correct result. There is a time difference of about 1 second on my MP3s because Kid3 always round down the milliseconds while Mp3tag would round up at about 0.5 sec. I double-checked it in foobar2000 because foobar2000 shows the milliseconds. Bitrate is consistent between the 2 applications.

I'll get a difference sometimes of 1kbps on the bitrate between the two. mp3tag is the one showing 1kbps more on the bitrate over Kid3 and mp3tag will show 1 second longer on the duration.

Would using foobar and mp3tag be a better choice for looking at the info, compare to Kid3?

THANKS

I am yet to find a sample that Mp3tag shows a 1kbps larger bitrate than Kid3. I guess Mp3tag will always either show the same length, or 1 second longer because it would round up the milliseconds if it is about 0.5 seconds. I guess the cutting point is 0.445 seconds since the last 5 would round up to 0.45, then 0.5 and then 1 second.

Kid3 always truncates and drops the milliseconds.

foobar2000 is the most accurate about information from my experience.

Please note that Mp3tag, Kid3 and TagScanner are mainly tag editors. You may use the one you are most comfortable with.

I like mp3tag it's nice, ok, so I'll just look at mp3tag for editing and foobar more for information...

THANKS