3.3 ID3v2 tags

The various flavors of ID3v1 tags See ID3v1 tags. had obvious limitations, leading to the introduction in 1998 of ID3v2 (by Mrtin Nilsson, Michael Mutschler et al.). Despite the name, this format has nothing to do with ID3v1. ID3v2 tags are much more complex. The tags are pre-pended to the files they describe. They are comprised of one or more frames, each of which contains one piece of information. There is provision for padding appended to the tag, to permit subsequent augmentation of the tag without having to re-write the entire file. ID3v1 tags suffered from the fact that they encoded text as ASCII (ISO-8859-1, at most): ID3v2 carried the encoding scheme along with textual information.

Furthermore, there are three versions of the ID3v2 spec that saw general use: