What do you mean, ID3v2?

In simple terms, id3tags refers to the label of the MP3 track.

Specifically, id3tags in fact simply "ID3" can be explained.

"ID3" means "generally is located in a MP3 file at the beginning or at the end of a number of bytes, attached to the mp3 of the singer, title, album name, age, style and other information, this information is called ID3 information, ID3 information is divided into two versions, V1 and v2 version. ”

Where: V1 version of the ID3 at the end of the MP3 file 128 bytes, starting with the tag three characters, followed by the song information.

V2 version is generally located at the beginning of MP3, can store lyrics, the album's Pictures and other large-capacity information.

and "tag" in the English word meaning is "label", so "Id3tags" is "MP3 file track label" meaning.

In some places the abbreviation "ID3" to represent the "Id3tags", the two are essentially the same.

If there is no ID3, then people can only judge a song according to the name of what it is, and even if you hear what song, its singer, album name you may not be able to back down, so to MP3 file add built-in tag is a matter of course. Interestingly, the MP3 label does not have an ISO international standard, and the various versions of ID3 are currently just a near-de-facto criterion, and no one is forcing the player or coding program to support it.

Contents and differences of ID3V1 and ID3v2

ID3v1 & id3v1.1

The MP3 format standard does not specifically define the structure for keeping track-related information, so in 1996 someone proposed a solution to add some additional data (byte) to the end of the mp3 file to save the song name, artist, album name, and so on, which is ID3 (v1).

The field name of the ID3v1 and the size of each field are fixed, as shown below

Song title? D? D30 characters

Artist? D? D30 characters

Album? D? D30 characters

Year? D? D4 characters

Comment? D? D30 characters

Genre? D? D byte

The only difference between id3v1.1 and ID3v1 is that there is a album track field that actually pulls two bytes from the end of the comment field above to hold the album track information. ID3v1 (v1.1) Everyone must be very familiar with, because MP3 has been widely used ID3, and even many people mistakenly think this is the standard of MP3 (in fact, MP3 format standard does not include ID3). Although widely used, id3v1,id3v1.1 has obvious flaws. Field names and field lengths are fixed dead, non-extensible, and inflexible. and 30 characters kerning in very limited, presumably a lot of people have encountered the title or artist too long truncated situation it. So someone proposed a new ID3v2 format to try to solve these problems and extend the functionality of ID3.

ID3v2

Although the name of ID3v2 seems to be just a id3v1 upgrade, the actual format definition ID3v2 and ID3v1 completely different, ID3v2 should be counted as a brand-new tag system. If used Winamp ID3 tag Editor, you know ID3v2 and id3v1 the most intuitive difference is the new addition of some text fields, such as composer, conductor, media type, copyright message and so on. But this is not the point, and the biggest improvement compared to ID3V1,ID3V2 should be greatly enhanced flexibility and malleable, not only is the length of each field extensible (no more worrying about the 30-character limit for ID3v1), and users can easily add custom fields.