Preston Media ID3 Tag Raw Tag Viewer

License:

Dale Preston, http://www.dalepreston.com, grants the user the right to use Preston Media ID3 Raw Tag Viewer on as many computers as he or she likes for the purpose of troubleshooting ID3 tags on backup copies of their MP3 files.  To use Preston Media ID3 Tag Backup, you must agree that they are using it solely at their own risk and will not hold Dale Preston or his heirs or assigns responsible for any damage or loss of data resulting from its use.  You must also agree that Dale Preston is not responsible for providing any support for Preston Media ID3 Raw Tag Viewer.

While I believe Preston Media ID3 Raw Viewer to be safe to use, there are many things that can cause the loss of data including user error or unexpected behavior from badly malformed ID3 tags.  You should only use Preston Media ID3 Raw Tag Viewer on backups of your MP3 files.  That just makes good sense - always backup files before modifying them in any way.

You may redistribute Preston Media ID3 Raw Tag Viewer only as a combination of this unedited ID3RawTagViewerReadMe.txt file and the original unmodified executable file.

Revision History:

1/10/2007 - Initial release.

Description:

ID3RawTagViewer is a program intended to allow the user to view the raw data in the ID3 tags on their MP3 files.  To learn more about ID3 tags, go to http://www.id3.org. 

To use ID3RawTagViewer, you can either browse to a MP3 file or drag and drop a MP3 file on the file name lable of the application.  ID3RrawTagViewer will also display the tags in ID3 files created by my tag backup program, ID3TagBackup.  You should always work with backed up ID3 files or MP3 files.

You can delete individual frames within a tag or delete the complete tag.  This is useful if your files will not open in your media player.  You can delete the ID3V2 (more likely to be the problem than the ID3V1) tag while keeping the ID3V1 tag.  This is also useful if you suspect a single frame may be the problem.

You might also use ID3RawTagViewer to examine tags as created by various programs and identify which programs that you may be using that are not following the ID3 standards at http://www.id3.org and may, therefore, be breaking your media applications.

Neither ID3RawTagViewer nor any other application can open all broken ID3 tags.  For instance, I have recently run across tags attached to 3MB MP3 files where frames within that tag stated their size as over 900 giga-bytes.  With such a malformed frame, it is impossible to know where the next frame in the tag starts.  The entire tag is useless.  In most cases, ID3RawTagViewer will show an appropriate error message but there is no way I can predict every possible broken tag or frame.

In most cases of broken tags that cannot even be displayed in ID3RawTagViewer, my ID3 tag backup program, ID3TagBackup, will still be able to remove the tag, preserving the original MP3 data.  One exception that comes to mind is when the entire tag size is mis-stated.  In that case, ID3TagBackup would remove an incorrect number of bytes, either too few  or too many, from the beginning of the file resulting in unpredictable results in the remaining MP3 data.  Typically, malformed initial MP3 data would just create a pop and at the next synchronization point - a fraction of a second - the MP3 file would begin to play properly.