IdEst
	ID3 Editing and Scripting Tool	Sergey Poznyakoff

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1 Introduction

Many ‘mp3’ files carry additional blocks of information, called ID3 tags. These tags supply additional information about the file, such as artist’s name, the title of the song, etc. There are currently two major versions of these tags. The version 1 is able to keep a predefined number of textual fields of limited length, and is written at the end of the file. The version 2 is much more flexible. It is able to keep arbitrary number of fields, called frames, which may be textual or binary data. The frame length is not limited. ID3 tags of this version are written at the beginning of the file, which makes them suitable for streaming.

Idest is a command line tool for manipulating ID3 tags. It allows you to create new tags, and to view, modify or delete the existing ones. When compiled with Guile¹, idest allows you to write programs of arbitrary complexity for manipulating ID3 tags and to apply them to any number of files.

The program name is an abbreviation for ‘ID3 Edit and Scripting Tool’. When speaking about the whole package, we spell its name as ‘IdEst’. When speaking about the program file name, we spell it idest. This latter spelling may be capitalized, if it occurs at the beginning of a sentence.