One Tag format to rule them all...

[SlasherMCT]

I have just been looking at Helium. This appears to have much better support for the various tag formats than MM. I would be tempted by Helium but from the forums the developers don't seem to be as receptive to user requests as the MM developers. In the current version their tag updating is not on a background thread and very slow.

I want to move to one tagging format only and clean out all of the other tag formats.

1. What do people think is the best tag format?
2. Is MM going to support more tag formats? For example MM seems to ignore APE style tags completely.

For example I would go with ID3V2 tags only - I don't care about music player support - and clear out Lyrics and APE tags

(I suspect there may be posts about this - I have searched around for them but haven't found anything)

Thanks

[jiri]

MM tries to support standards whenever possible, and ID3 is the standard for MP3s, APE is not. MM however uses APE tags e.g. for APE or MPC files.

Jiri

[SlasherMCT]

I would think that MM must at least be aware of other tags in mp3's in order to parse the file correctly...

[jiri]

By 'other' you probably mean APE tags. Well, as I wrote, APE tags are pretty far from being a standard for mp3s. While ID3 tags are used by almost every SW or HW implementation, APE is used only by a couple of special applications. Actually, I don't think anyone has ever requested this here in forum...

Jiri

[Teknojnky]

Personally I think MM should use every tool at its disposal to *read* any tags, yet write/update in the tag format selected in the options.

Just because something may not be 'standard', does not mean some other app wont attempt to use it.

Reading ALL 'non-standard' tags and fields would be the most user friendly, even if unable to write said tag.

[SlasherMCT]

I agree.

Helium will display which tag types it finds. For some of my files it found APE and Lyrics tags - I have no idea how they got in there. ...

Some taggers seem to put metadata like GUIDs in there. I don't want anything to link my mp3 files to my computer for privacy reasons.

I have been looking around today and there are plenty of tools to add or edit tags, but I haven't found anything to strip them all out, or say remove comments from all files - which is what I want to do.

[Peke]

This is the case with WAVE-s RIFF Metadata LIST Chunk is standard but MM also reads AudioGrabber, MMJB, Soundforge (99% by standard), Recognizes CART, On To-Do is Album Art Support (Single Image By Standard).

There are also several Other Examples in Other File Formats but this is The Biggest example.