ID3

Last updated

ID3 is a metadata container most often used in conjunction with the MP3 audio file format. It allows information such as the title, artist, album, track number, and other information about the file to be stored in the file itself.

Contents

ID3 is a de facto standard for metadata in MP3 files; no standardization body was involved in its creation nor has such an organization given it a formal approval status. [1] It competes with the APE tag in this area.

There are two unrelated versions of ID3: ID3v1 and ID3v2. In ID3v1, the metadata is stored in a 128-byte segment at the end of the file. In ID3v2, an extensible set of "frames" located at the start of the file is used. Subvariants of both versions exist.

ID3v1

When the MP3 standard was published in 1995, it did not include a method for storing file metadata. In 1996 Eric Kemp[ clarification needed ] proposed adding a 128-byte suffix to MP3 files, which would store useful information such as an artist's name or a related album title. Kemp deliberately placed the tag data (which is demarcated with the 3-byte string TAG) at the end of the file as it would cause a short burst of static to be played by older media players that did not support the tag. The method, now known as ID3v1, quickly became the de facto standard for storing metadata in MP3s [2] despite internationalization and localization weaknesses arising from the standard's use of ISO-8859-1 system of encoding rather than the more globally compatible Unicode.

The v1 tag allows 30 bytes each for the title, artist, album, and a "comment", 4 bytes for the year, and 1 byte to identify the genre of the song from a predefined list of values. [3] [4]

ID3v1.1

In 1997, a modification to ID3v1 was proposed by Michael Mutschler[ clarification needed ] in which two bytes formerly allocated to the comment field were used instead to store a track number so that albums stored across multiple files could be correctly ordered. The modified format became known as ID3v1.1. [2]

ID3v1.2

In 2002 or 2003,[ which? ] BirdCage Software proposed ID3v1.2, which enlarged many of the fields from 30 to 60 bytes and added a subgenre field while retaining backward compatibility with v1.1 by placing its new "enhanced" tag in front of a standard v1.1 tag. [5] [6] Adoption of ID3v1.2 was limited.[ citation needed ]

ID3v2

Id3v2 logo.svg

In 1998, a new specification called ID3v2 was created by multiple contributors. [7] Although it bears the name ID3, its structure is completely distinct from that of ID3v1. ID3v2 tags are of variable size and are usually placed at the start of the file, which enables metadata to load immediately, even when the file as a whole is loading incrementally during streaming.

A ID3v2 tag consists of a number of optional frames, each of which contains a piece of metadata up to 16 MB in size. For example, a TT2 frame may be included to contain a title. The entire tag may be as large as 256 MB, and strings may be encoded in Unicode. [8]

ID3v2.2

The first public variant of v2, ID3v2.2, used three character frame identifiers rather than four (TT2 for the title instead of TIT2). It is considered obsolete. [9]

ID3v2.3

ID3v2.3 is the most widely used version of ID3v2 tags and is widely supported by Windows Explorer and Windows Media Player. [10] Notably it introduced the ability to embed an image such as an album cover. [11]

ID3v2.4

ID3v2.4 was published on November 1, 2000. It defines 83 frame types, [12] allows text frames to contain multiple values separated with a null byte, and permits the tag to be stored at either the beginning or the end of the file. [13]

Notable features

Chapters

An ID3v2 Chapter Addendum was published in December 2005. It allows users to jump easily to specific locations or chapters within an audio file and can provide a synchronized slide show of images and titles during playback. Typical use-cases include Enhanced podcasts and it can be used in ID3v2.3 or ID3v2.4 tags. [14]

Lyrics

Lyrics3v1 [15] and Lyrics3v2 [16] were tag standards implemented before ID3v2, for adding lyrics to mp3 files. The difference with ID3v2 is that Lyrics3 is always at the end of an MP3 file, before the ID3v1 tag.

Editing ID3 tags

ID3 tags may be edited in a variety of ways. Specialized applications, called tag editors, enable precise editing of all fields or frames and permit sophisticated batch editing, but many audio players provide native editing of common fields or frames. Some file managers also provide tag editing capabilities.

Non-MP3 implementation

ID3 tags were designed for the MP3 format, but the tagsets are an independent part of the MP3 file and can be used elsewhere. ID3v2 tags are sometimes used with AIFF and WAV files, [17] and MP4 allows the embedding of an ID3 tag. [18]

See also

Related Research Articles

Waveform Audio File Format is an audio file format standard for storing an audio bitstream on personal computers. The format was developed and published for the first time in 1991 by IBM and Microsoft. It is the main format used on Microsoft Windows systems for uncompressed audio. The usual bitstream encoding is the linear pulse-code modulation (LPCM) format.

Audio Interchange File Format (AIFF) is an audio file format standard used for storing sound data for personal computers and other electronic audio devices. The format was developed by Apple Inc. in 1988 based on Electronic Arts' Interchange File Format and is most commonly used on Apple Macintosh computer systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">FLAC</span> Lossless digital audio coding format

FLAC is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference software package that includes a codec implementation. Digital audio compressed by FLAC's algorithm can typically be reduced to between 50 and 70 percent of its original size and decompresses to an identical copy of the original audio data.

The following comparison of video players compares general and technical information for notable software media player programs.

ReplayGain is a proposed technical standard published by David Robinson in 2001 to measure and normalize the perceived loudness of audio in computer audio formats such as MP3 and Ogg Vorbis. It allows media players to normalize loudness for individual tracks or albums. This avoids the common problem of having to manually adjust volume levels between tracks when playing audio files from albums that have been mastered at different loudness levels.

APE tags comprise one extant convention used to store information (metadata) about a given digital audio file. Each APE tag constitutes a discrete element that describes a single attribute of the file's contents. Each consists of a key/value pair; the key is simply a label that names the attribute, such as Year, Title, Artist, or Track Number, etc.), and associated with it is a corresponding value, namely, some information descriptive of this file, in terms of the attribute in question. APE tags can be used with .ape-formatted recordings, as well as with sound files of other audio file formats.

The International Standard Recording Code (ISRC) is an international standard code for uniquely identifying sound recordings and music video recordings. The code was developed by the recording industry in conjunction with the ISO technical committee 46, subcommittee 9, which codified the standard as ISO 3901 in 1986, and updated it in 2001.

Music Player Daemon (MPD) is a free and open source music player server. It plays audio files, organizes playlists and maintains a music database. In order to interact with it, a client program is needed. The MPD distribution includes mpc, a simple command line client.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tag editor</span> Software for editing the metadata of media files

A tag editor is an app that can add, edit, or remove embedded metadata on multimedia file formats. Content creators, such as musicians, photographers, podcasters, and video producers, may need to properly label and manage their creations, adding such details as title, creator, date of creation, and copyright notice.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">EasyTag</span> Tag editor

EasyTag is a graphical tag editor that is part of the GNOME project. EasyTag runs on Linux and Microsoft Windows, and there was an attempt to bring EasyTAG to OS X circa 2014. It is written in C and relies on GTK+ and id3lib for graphics and ID3 tag handling respectively. As of version 2.1.1, EasyTag also uses the tag manipulation library provided by the MAD project, for support of ID3v2.4.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MP4 file format</span> Digital format for storing video and audio

MPEG-4 Part 14, or MP4, is a digital multimedia container format most commonly used to store video and audio, but it can also be used to store other data such as subtitles and still images. Like most modern container formats, it allows streaming over the Internet. The only filename extension for MPEG-4 Part 14 files as defined by the specification is .mp4. MPEG-4 Part 14 is a standard specified as a part of MPEG-4.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MP3Gain</span> Volume normalization software

MP3Gain is an audio normalization software tool. The tool is available on multiple platforms and is free software. It analyzes the MP3 and reversibly changes its volume. The volume can be adjusted for single files or as album where all files would have the same perceived loudness. It is an implementation of ReplayGain. In 2015 Debian and Ubuntu removed it from their repositories due to a lack of an active maintainer.

mp3DirectCut Audio editor

mp3DirectCut is a lossless editor for MP3 audio files, able to provide cuts and crops, copy and paste, gain and fades to audio files without having to decode or re-encode the audio. By modifying the global gain field of each frame of MPEG audio, the volume of that frame can be modified without altering the audio data itself. This allows for rapid, lossless MP3 audio editing that does not degrade the data from re-encoding. mp3DirectCut provides audio normalization and pause (silence) detection, and can split long recordings into separate files based on cue points in the audio, such as those provided by pause detection. mp3DirectCut can also record audio directly to MP3 from the computer's sound card input.

freedup is a program to scan directories or file lists for duplicate files. The file lists may be provided to an input pipe or internally generated using find with provided options. There are more options to specify the search conditions more detailed. Other options influence the performed actions, i.e. whether to display only or to specify what kind of link under which circumstances. freedup first compares file sizes, then on equal sizes the MD5 signatures, and before taking actions a byte-by-byte check for verification is performed. An interactive mode allows to decide individually which files to link soft or hard or to delete.

The ISO base media file format (ISOBMFF) is a container file format that defines a general structure for files that contain time-based multimedia data such as video and audio. It is standardized in ISO/IEC 14496-12, a.k.a. MPEG-4 Part 12, and was formerly also published as ISO/IEC 15444-12, a.k.a. JPEG 2000 Part 12.

The following comparison of audio players compares general and technical information for a number of software media player programs. For the purpose of this comparison, "audio players" are defined as any media player explicitly designed to play audio files, with limited or no support for video playback. Multi-media players designed for video playback, which can also play music, are included under comparison of video player software.

MPEG-1 Audio Layer III HD was an audio compression codec developed by Technicolor, formerly known as Thomson.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Puddletag</span> Tag editor for Unix-like operating systems

Puddletag is a graphical audio file metadata editor ("tagger") for Unix-like operating systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kid3</span> Tag editor

Kid3 is an open-source cross-platform audio tag editor for many audio file formats. It supports DSF, MP3, Ogg, FLAC, MPC, MPEG-4 (mp4/m4a/m4b), AAC, Opus, SPX, TrueAudio, APE, WavPack, WMA, WAV, AIFF, tracker modules.

References

  1. ↑ "History – ID3.org". Archived from the original on 2010-12-24. Retrieved 2011-01-22.
  2. 1 2 Practical Common Lisp, p. 335.
  3. ↑ "ID3v1 – ID3.org". id3.org. Archived from the original on 2015-06-20. Retrieved 2018-04-12.
  4. ↑ "ID3 Genre List".
  5. ↑ "ID3v1.2".
  6. ↑ "MP3 TAG & Enhanced TAG description (english)". 2012-03-10. Archived from the original on 2012-03-10. Retrieved 2018-04-12.
  7. ↑ "Contributors – ID3.org". Archived from the original on 2016-12-03. Retrieved 2012-04-22.
  8. ↑ "id3v2-00 – ID3.org". Archived from the original on 2016-11-24. Retrieved 2011-09-07.
  9. ↑ Nilsson, Martin. "ID3 Developer Information". ID3.org. Archived from the original on 26 August 2012. Retrieved 9 April 2011.
  10. ↑ "ID3 tag version 2.3.0". Archived from the original on 2016-11-17. Retrieved 2015-04-11.
  11. ↑ "id3v2.3.0 – ID3.org". Archived from the original on 2015-11-21. Retrieved 2014-04-30.
  12. ↑ "ID3v2.4.0 Native Frames". Archived from the original on 2022-09-03. Retrieved 2012-12-27.
  13. ↑ "ID3 tag version 2.4.0 – Native Frames". Archived from the original on 2016-10-28. Retrieved 2015-04-11.
  14. ↑ Newell, C. (2 December 2005). "ID3v2 Chapter Frame Addendum". ID3.org. Archived from the original on 2022-11-15. Retrieved 2008-02-06.
  15. ↑ "Lyrics3 – ID3.org". id3.org. Archived from the original on 2022-09-24. Retrieved 2018-04-13.
  16. ↑ "Lyrics3v2 – ID3.org". id3.org. Archived from the original on 2022-08-10. Retrieved 2018-04-13.
  17. ↑ "Windows Media Developer Center: ID3 Tag Support". Microsoft Developer Network . Microsoft . Retrieved 2010-03-24.
  18. ↑ "The 'MP4' Registration Authority". Archived from the original on 2018-03-09. Retrieved 2007-10-18.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.