IdEst – ID3 Editing and Scripting Tool: Tag Versions

2 ID3 Tag Versions

The version 1 of ID3 tags offers a very limited set of possibilities, compared to its successor, version 2. You should know these limitations in order to understand their implications when creating version 1 tags or converting version 2 to version 1.

Properly speaking, the pure version 1 tag is seldom used. It is its modified version, called 1.1 which is used most often.

The version 1.1 tag contains the following frames:

Field	Width	Description
title	30	The title
artist	30	The artist name
album	30	The album name
year	4	A four-digit year
comment	28	The comment.
track	1	The number of the track on the album.
genre	1	Index in a list of genres, see below.

Table 2.1: ID3v1.1 tag

The last field, ‘genre’, merits special notice. It is an ordinal number of genre in a predefined table of genres (see Genre Codes). When modifying or setting this tag, you should supply one of the values listed in that table (case-insensitive). If the value you supply is not found in that table, the value ‘Other’ will be used.

The version 2 is much more advanced and flexible. It was initially described in http://www.id3.org/id3v2-00. The current version is 2.4.0 and it is discussed in detail in http://www.id3.org/id3v2.4.0-frames. In this manual, unless expressly noted otherwise, when speaking about version 2 we actually mean 2.4.0.

The ID3v2 frames are named using four-character abbreviations. The 7 most used frames, corresponding to the ID3v1 fields, are:

Frame	V1 field
TIT2	title
TPE1	artist
TALB	album
TDRC	year
COMM	comment
TRCK	track
TCON	genre

Table 2.2: Some ID3v2 frames

Idest 2.1 internally operates on ID3v2 tags of version 2.4.0. It is able to handle any prior versions as well: such tags are implicitly converted to the latest version. When creating or modifying tags, idest always stores updated tags in version 2.4.0.

This document was generated on March 11, 2017 using makeinfo.

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