Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Tag writing, UTF-8/Latin1

[Alex Lancaster <alexl users sourceforge net>]

>>>>> "P" == Peter   writes:

[...]

P> Given this mismatch in ID3 support, should the RB FAQ be updated?

P> http://www.gnome.org/projects/rhythmbox/faq.html

Yes, indeed, I have filed a bug about it:
http://bugs.gnome.org/390189, it needs somebody with write access to
the website to change it.  Meanwhile, the wiki tends to be kept more
up-to-date:

http://live.gnome.org/Rhythmbox/TagWriting

[...]

P> A related question - I've found my in car CD player doesn't read
P> the ID3 tags on the latest mp3 CD that I made using rhythmbox 0.9.6
P> / SoundJuicer 2.14.4 and gstreamer-0.10.x to rip the mp3 files.  I
P> believe that these new mp3 files would be using ID3 v2.4 for the
P> tags.

P> I suspect that my in car Sony mp3 CD player understands "old" ID3
P> v2.3 tags (as written with EasyTag), but not "new" ID3 v2.4 tags
P> written by gstreamer.  Does this sound possible?

Yes, that's entirely possible, in fact, probable in your case.

P> Can gstreamer-0.10.x be used to tag mp3 files using the older ID3
P> v2.3 standard, or will it only do ID3 v2.4?

AFAIK, it will only ever write ID3v2.4 tags.

P> Is there an easy way to find out what version(s) of ID3 an mp3 file
P> contains?

If you run "file" on each file, it will tell you which, e.g. if
ID3v2.3 is in the file:

k$ file ~/mp3/foobar.mp3
mp3/foobar.mp3:
Audio file with ID3 version 23.0 tag, MP3 encoding

Or for ID3v2.4 you will see:
Audio file with ID3 version 24.0 tag, MP3 encoding

I believe that it is possible to only have one ID3v2 tag per file,
although you may have both ID3v1 and ID3v2.

If you have id3lib installed you can run: 

$ id3info foobar.mp3 

to get the tag information, although it will only show tags <= ID3v2.3
(not ID3v2.4).

Yes, ID3 is messy... ;)

Alex