ID3v1, anyone still using it?

[Zhang Weiwu <zhangweiwu realss com>]

Dear all

I started a new topic 'cos it seems seperate.

By writing both ID3v1 and ID3v2 we have these questions:

- What if ID3v2 contains more characters than allowed in ID3v1? Is the ID3v1
  version trimmed?
- When ID3v2 contains non-ASCII, what is written in ID3v1? EasyTag defaults
  to ISO-8859-1 but AFAIK this is unspecified, and ISO-8859-1 is a western
  convention.  Most audio file you can find in China contains China's local
  encoding in ID3v1 and in Japan it is the same.
- What to do if EasyTag reads a file with both ID3v1 and ID3v2, and the data
  there are inconsistant? This happens a lot in case of encoding mismatch.

These problems are gone if we do not write ID3v1 tags, and indeed I 
configured my EasyTag so. But whether or not we should default to this, 
depends on the following:

- What would players do if they see both ID3v1 and ID3v2? Do all of them
  consistantly prefer using ID3V2?
- 16 years has passed since ID3V2. Are there players that still only support
  ID3V1? I do not think there are any, but, maybe there a practical reason
  to use ID3v1 - for example some home music player may have LCDs of exactly
  60 characters space on them, and since they rely on ID3 tag editors always
  copy-writing ID3v1, they decide not to bother reading ID3v2 tags at all.
  Is this my imagination or are there such devices really still being
  produced and used?

Unless there is a pressing need to preserve ID3v2 for practical reasons 
listed above, I am afraid we should drop ID3v1 writing, because users 
consider mojibaking (ID3v1 written in ISO-88859-1 while player read them as 
SHIFT-JIS) being worse than having no information (player could not read 
ID3v2 and there was no ID3v1). The latter case is minor anyway, since by 
common sense most player would use filenames if there were no ID3v1.

Now if we drop ID3v1, it paves a good ground for refactoring. Otherwise user 
interface design must cater the limitation of ID3v1.

By naming your product EasyTag you implied you would sacrifice technical 
nuance for the ease of use. How everyone think?

Best.