MP3 Tag
MP3 Tag is a part of metadata container used in MP3 music files. It allows containing various kinds of information such as: album cover artwork, title, artist, album, track number, and other information about the song to be stored permanently inside the MP3 file.
Unlike the Library approach that some music software use to keep information about the songs, MP3 tags are a portable solution. Typical music library example is iTunes Library. iTunes stores rating (stars) data in their own database like files. This makes rating data available only for the current iTunes installation. In case if this data is stored as an MP3 tag, any other software or hardware player also will be able to read it.
Initially the MP3 files were unable to carry any data about the song. In 1996 Eric Kemp offered to add a small chunk of data to the end of MP3 audio file. This MP3 tags version is now known as ID3v1 (ID3 version 1). Eric’s idea quickly became the de facto standard for storing metadata inside the MP3 files.
First MP3 tags version had a grave disadvantage. It was only 128 bytes long, which could have been insufficient to carry enough data about the song. It also had no respect for non-roman languages especially for multi-byte encoded. Japanese characters are a good example.
In 1998 ID3v2 was created. MP3 tags become a variable size piece of data and the internationalization problem was solved by introducing the UTF-16 encoding support. Storing of album cover images inside the MP3 files also became possible.
Modern MP3 files can carry more than enough kinds of data for most listeners.
TagTuner can edit more than 25 major MP3 tags including Album Covers Artwork.
