MP3 properties

[Bruin 1953]

I have 1000's of MP3 files whose properties (title, artist, etc) need standardization.
The files are stored in different folders according to genre, and the file name reflects the name of piece and the artist. So the task is easy once the address of each property is located.

I searched this site and found that MP3 properties occupy the last 128 bytes of the file, and the data look like this:
' magic 3 chars (always set to 'TAG')
' title 30 chars
' artist 30 chars
' album 30 chars
' year 4 chars
' comment 28 chars
' termination 1 byte (always 0)
' track 1 byte
' genre 1 byte

However, I used W-Explorer to manually set the genre of one MP3 file to "Reading". Surely, the word "Reading" appears in the list view along with Pop, Country, etc.

So much for 1-byte Genre at the very EOF!

I inspected that file for the word "Reading", and found it at th 120th byte, not within the !ast 128 byte!

Some education, please!

[vb5prgrmr]

For more education than you want see http://www.wotsit.org/list.asp?search=mp3 for SDK see

http://search.microsoft.com/results....FORM=QBME1&l=1


Good Luck

[Bruin 1953]

Thanks for the reply!

I now know that there are two ID3 versions:
v1 at the end of the file (128 bytes)
v2 at the beginning of the file (up to 256MB!)
Obviously, v1 tags are fixed-length, while those in v2 are variable-length.

And I have just downloaded a little vb6 program by the name MP3_IDV2
It includes 4 functions to read and write both versions of tags.
Recommended!