ID3

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. 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. 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. Sub-variants of both versions exist.

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. 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. 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. Sub-variants of both versions exist. ==ID3v1== When the MP3 standard was published in 1995¹, it did not include a method for storing file metadata. In 1996 Eric Kemp 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 ) 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 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. ===ID3v1.1=== In 1997, a modification to ID3v1 was proposed by Michael Mutschler 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. ===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. ===ID3v2.3=== ID3v2.3 is the most widely used version of ID3v2 tags and is widely supported by Windows Explorer and Windows Media Player. Notably it introduced the ability to embed an image such as an album cover. ===ID3v2.4=== ID3v2.4 was published on November 1, 2000. It defines 83 frame types, 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. ==Notable features== ===Chapters=== An ID3v2 Chapter Addendum was published in December 2005¹. 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. ===Lyrics=== Lyrics3v1 and Lyrics3v2 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.

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