iTunes and ID3

Today’s lesson:

ID3 tags are annoying. All the different versions of them, that is.

I’ve been using my own script for ripping CD tracks and converting them to MP3, with all of the appropriate ID3 tags and such. That required manually entering all the album and track data though, which was a pain. I considered extending the script to get the appropriate information from the CDDB databases automatically, but that’s a lot of work and I never got around to it.

Now that I have the iBook though, it turns out that iTunes is a pretty good CD ripper. I can slap a CD in, select all the tracks, wander away and come back ten minutes later to a complete set of properly-sorted 192kbps MP3s. However, not all was well. If I took the tracks and then tried to play them in xmms or on the PocketPC, the ID3 information would not show up. It looks like Apple is using their own extended version of the ID3 tags to embed extra information like the album jacket cover pictures, and other programs haven’t caught up yet.

Fortunately, the fix is simple. If I use the “Convert ID3 tags” option and set it back to version 1.1, the tags are now properly recognized by everything else. I don’t think I’m using any of the extended tags that would get lost in the conversion anyway.