ID3v1 or ID3v2?

[rudeboymcc]

hi. i'm in the process of sorting out my music and one thing i'm trying to do is get all the songs with id tags.

as you probbaly know there are two versions, id3v1 and id3v2.

the difference?

from what i can see, id3v1 cannot store as many characters in each field, but is slightly faster than id3v2.

does anyone know any other difference and which one do you recommend?

the speed is important to me becuse when i load all my music into winamp i don't want to wait for everything to show up after 5 minutes.

[Latexxx]

Use Foobar2000 (http://www.foobar2000.org) and id3v1 + Ape v2 (http://www.personal.uni-jena.de/~pfk/mpp/sv8/apetag.html).

[rudeboymcc]

ape tags sound very good, but i'm looking for maximum compatibility that's why i've stuck with id3.

also i'm getting an mp3 player and i don't want to not get one just becuase it doesn't support ape tags.

[Latexxx]

You can use Ape for advanced tagging and add Id3v1 tags for compatibility reasons. Foobar2000 does this automatically. I don't know if any portable players read information from Id3v2.

[KpeX]

IMO Latexxx's suggestion is right on. I use foobar + ID3v1 + ape on all my MP3s, and my car stereo player reads the ID3v1 tags just fine. There are some rumors about ID3v2 breaking compatibility, and while they may be false, the fact that few portable devices support ID3v2 is enough for me to use ID3v1 + Ape.

[Sirber]

I usualy use ID3v1 and ID3v2. What is APE?

[KpeX]

http://www.personal.uni-jena.de/~pfk/mpp/sv8/apetag.html

Usable for several audio formats. Matroska tagging system is based on it.