Embedded art in MP3 ID3v2 tags

Apologies if the title is confusing. Hopefully the explanation is less so.
I've a pet project where I'd like to display embedded MP3 album art. Using TagLib#, implemented the standard methods (ID3v1 was straightforward and ID3v2 only slightly more complicated). However discovered most of my collection does not have standard embedded
art. I only believed it did, because Windows displays it (both in the folder view and inside Media Player.
After much googling, discovered WMP uses private (PRIV) frames, rather than the standard (APIC) for attached pictures in ID3v2. Nowhere can I find these documented. After spending hours attempting to guess which frames were used and the format, decided this
might merit input from the heavy hitters here.
I had realized Microsoft "did their own thing" with tags, having trouble keeping my collection in sync between machines, turned off automatic tag updating long ago. Just never needed to understand technical details until now.

As far as I know, WMP doesn't use PRIV frames for storing album art. Rather, it stores the album art as hidden JPG files alongside the music files. If you don't see these files in Windows Explorer, make sure that it's set to show hidden files and folders,
and to show protected system files.
Note that album art that is manually added by the user (e.g. Paste album art) gets both embedded as an APIC frame and stored as JPG, while album art from WMP's automatic lookups only gets stored as JPG.
Tim De Baets
http://www.bm-productions.tk

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ITunes corrupts ID3v2 tags in mp3

First - I couldn't find any form for a bug report on this site, so I'm using this forum. If it is wrong please feel free to redirect me to correct place.
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What I need now is to return my tags to their previos state. I think that iTunes developers should 1)fix this bug 2)write an utility to restore the tags (it is their fault that the tags were corrupted).
Thanks for reading.
Waiting for response from developers.
--ss

I should have been said that I'm using iTunes for windows.
And this link http://www.apple.com/feedback/itunes.html leads to the "Request Music" page.
I know that "plaintext" is not an encoding(the real encoding of my m3u is win1251), I've just tried to say that winamp's playlist is not in unicode.
Okay, unicode is great. But why it converted only song's title, but not artist or album name?
I still would like to hear answers to my questions:
1. why iTunes skipped a lot of mp3's when I've tried to add a whole directory with it's subdirectories?
2. why it converts only song's name and not the reset?
3. will they publish some utility to recover id3 tags? (it is not hard to write such a programm)

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I e-mailed tech support on this one, but it seemed like they spent 2 seconds reading it and then sending a template reply.
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When I try looking for a file which only has id3v2 tags, things don't work properly. Let's say I have this info in the id3v2 tag: "Mr.Artist - Mr. Track - Mr.Album".
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Please help me out on this one. It would be greatly apreciated.Message Edited by Rognalf on 06-09-20070:57 AM
Message Edited by Rognalf on 06-09-2007:00 AM

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Hello,
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Thanks

Hello,
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MP3 IDv2 Tag Viewer & File Renamer

Just a simple perl script that views and renames files based on mp3 tags. It supports UTF-8. If any one interested check it out.
Find ID3v2 tags inside mp3 files under linux/unix environment with perl and MP3::Tag module installed.
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Source: https://github.com/GoTux/Perl/blob/master/mp3nfo.pl
You can also find exe/dll/ocx meta viewer script and few others if any one care: http://wiki.gotux.net/code
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TuxLyn wrote:Alright, thanks mate. Move it.
Done

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i have had the same problem.
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It seems when writing an MP3 Comment tag that iTunes needs the language to be specified with the correct three character code, or else left unused.
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I can drag it to a playlist,
If it gets added to this playlist, it is in iTunes library.
Select it in iTunes, right click - Show in Finder to see where it is on your HD.
If it is not in the location shown in iTunes prefs > Advanced. make sure *Copy files to iTunes media folder when adding to library* is ticked.
Spotlight shows it residing in my Music Library,
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I'm using nepomuk to index my music collection, but I noticed that the id3v2 tags are not indexed: dolphin does not show the information from the tags neither do bangarang. However, id3v1 tags are present. I don't know where to look at in order to find out what's wrong. Here are the relevant id3 tag support libraries, which I have installed:
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Ok, I tried with an empty $HOME and the problem is not present... obviously, my home directory is getting older and needs some clean-up But then, I removed my music folder from nepomuk several times and I expected that it will be reindexed... How can I force strigi/nepomuk to reread the meta data from the files??
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Nasty ID3V2 tag bug

This is for any of the Apple team. I discovered a pretty bad ID3V2 bug in iTunes for Windows, 6.0.4.2.
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This can get pretty nasty on Unicode tags which can then only store 64 characters before it breaks things.
iTunes and presumably the iPod and any other Apple supplied tools will probably read that data correctly as I am assuming they use a common library. But...it will break any third party tools. Not good.
Mac Mini Windows XP Pro

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Windows XP

Is there a way to add album art without it being embedded in the MP3 file?

The reason for my question is that I don't have the color display on my 20gb iPod, so I don't want to waste space by adding album art to the mp3/aac file. But, it'd be cool to have the art within iTunes on my computer.
I just read in another thread that the way iTunes 7 takes care of the album art does not actually attach it to the track. Is this true?

There is not.
Even with the high res art from the iTune Store, I believe the file size increase is less than 2%, at least for my library.

Removing album art from MP3s on the Z

I've been reading around on the forums and haven't found a definiti've for my problem.
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Does anyone have any solutions to this? Somehow the album art isn't placed onto the file until I transfer onto the ZVM. And it only adds album art to files which have have no album information in its tag or has album art.

You can use Zortam MP3 Media Studio 6.0 to remove album art that is in the ID3 tag. It cost around $25, but it seems to be a good program.
http://www.zortam.com
Why would you want to get rid of the album art?

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I have a MacBook Pro with OS 10.4.11, and iPod Classic v1.1.1, and I'm having a problem:
Any artwork that I retrieved using iTunes' "Get Album Artwork" option DOES NOT show up on my iPod. All the artwork I manually retrieved from Google (copy & pasted) shows fine.
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Anyone else having this problem? Any way to let Apple know directly?

*How to find tracks without artwork*
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tt2

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MP3 ID3 tags in non standard character set

Hello,
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Is there a simpler and more straight-forward way of doing this?
--Nan

nan wrote:
Hello,
I'm curious as to how I can rip a cd as mp3 and read the tags that have been encoded in a non western or unicode character set. Right now I'm using the LANG environment variable and setting it to the locale that matches the character set, ripping the songs, and then writing the tags using easytag as unicode before resetting the LANG variable. This is fine, but it gets annoying as once I change the language a lot of my programs also start using that language and I would like them to remain english.
Is there a simpler and more straight-forward way of doing this?
--Nan
Just guessing, but what if you only set LC_CTYPE to whatever language you need?

Embedded art in MP3 ID3v2 tags

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