From: Noah Smith <midblue_at_carolina.rr.com>
Date: Wed, 7 Apr 2004 16:11:17 -0400

"Björn Stenberg" <bjorn_at_haxx.se> wroted:
> Noah Smith wrote:
> > I was wondering about the fesability of incorporating APEv2 tag
reading
> > into Rockbox. It's the preferred tagging system for Foobar2K,
>
> Could you just tell us one thing: Why?
>
> In what way is the APEv2 tag so vastly superior to ID3v2.4 that foobar2k
users
> are convinced the world is better with Yet Another Mp3 Tag?

Actually, I'm not a Foobar user myself. I use Winamp typically, but I've
stayed away from ID3v2 for a few reasons. One of the biggest problem I had
was with some players misinterpreting the play time and bitrate because of
the v2 tag obscuring the VBR header information. Other players, though in
this case not ones I use, completely choke on a ID3v2 tag, refusing to play
the track or attempting to play the other data as sound.

In a discussion on hydrogenaudio.org, the primary Foobar dev mentioned other
reasons for the preference:

"It's not about writing the tag at the beginning of file (Vorbis comments
are stored at the beginning of file too), it's about serious issues with the
standard itself, such as supporting multiple different character sets
instead of forcing unicode (which allows any character to be stored
correctly), so code reading the tag needs separately handle all of character
encodings allowed by the "standard" (even official id3v2 libraries have
major issues with that); or using field codes instead of full field name
strings (no backwards compatibility, adding new fields requires changes in
the "standard")."
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?showtopic=10568&view=findpost&p=107974

Does that help answer your question any? Thanks for your time Björn, I
really appreciate everything you and all the other devs do for Rockbox.

-- 
Noah
.Charter Member of The League For Claiming Membership
.In Your Sigs For Groups That Are Really Just For
.Claiming Membership In Your Sig
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Received on 2004-04-07