Lame options for "Album Artist"
2010-03-30 20:52:54
I wish to use Lame to encode MP3s with an Album Artist tag that Foobar2000 will recognize. First thing's first: I know there's no "official" Album Artist tag in ID3. I know that WMP, ITunes, and some other applications use the TPE2 tag, and that Foobar2000 uses a "TXXX=ALBUM ARTIST" tag. I tried using this command-line:lame --ignore-tag-errors --tv "TXXX=ALBUM ARTIST=String1" file.wav Lame didn't print any errors or warnings (even if I left off "--ignore-tag-errors"), but Foobar didn't show any tags on the file. I then set the "Album Artist" tag manually to "String2" within Foobar, and then opened the MP3 file in a hex editor. I was surprised to see two instances of the tag present within the ID3 header. Here's the relevant part of the ID3 header, copied from my hex editor (it copies all ascii characters directly, and leaves all others in hex form):ID3<bh:04><bh:00><bh:80><bh:00><bh:00><bh:11><bh:0e>TXXX<bh:00><bh:00><bh:00><bh:16><bh:00><bh:00><bh:03>ALBUM ARTIST<bh:00>String2<bh:00>TSSE<bh:00> <bh:00><bh:00>4<bh:00><bh:00><bh:00>LAME 32bits version 3.98.3 (http://www.mp3dev.org/)TXXX<bh:00><bh:00><bh:00><bh:15><bh:00><bh:00><bh:00>ALBUM ARTIST=String1TLEN<bh:00> <bh:00><bh:00><bh:07><bh:00><bh:00><bh:00>328810 As you can see, there are two ALBUM ARTIST fields, and they have different sets of bytes between the TXXX and the ALBUM ARTIST strings. I also see that Foobar put a null byte in between the ALBUM ARTIST string and the value, while Lame put an equals sign. Is either Lame or Foobar doing something in violation of the ID3 spec? (Edited to fix the long textbox caused by the hex dump)