Introduction
Summary
ID3 details
An mp3 file is usually tagged with an ID3 tag which holds additional information about the music the
file contains. The information stored inside an ID3 tag can be virtually anything that you can imagine
and can be up to a maximum of 256MB of data. However, FreeTagNavigator does not go that far. It allows
you to change the basic and most used information stored inside the ID3 tag.
There are two types of ID3 tags. The old format ID3v1 and the new format ID3v2. The difference in these
are that the old ID3v1 has a fixed size of 128 Bytes and therefore can hold limited information,
although quite some people think that this is already enough for them. For the more demanding people
there is the ID3v2 tag which can hold data of any type or length, for example: The complete history
of the singer or the complete lyrics of the song or the pictures of the covers of the CD.
ID3 support
You can choose which version of the ID3 tag you want to store inside the mp3, although it does not harm
to store both. As FreeTagNavigator handles only the basic information, the impact of the size is not that big.
Do remember though that FreeTagNavigator can only read ID3v2.3 and ID3v2.4 and writes only ID3v2.4 as any
older version than this is no longer supported by the ID3 standard. However, since many (old) programs still
use ID3v2.3, writing to ID3v2.3 will be supported soon too.
Unicode support
FreeTagNavigator does not support a Unicode operating system.
Although this has not been tested before, it may work but we cannot be held responsible
if something bad happens. Use it at your own risk!
Mp3 details
General information about the mp3 is given in the picture below and has nothing to do with an
ID3 tag but may be interesting to know what quality the mp3 has.
Mp3 detailed information
Program use
Sections of a filename
Throughout the program, sections will be used to manipulate data quick and easy. Not only for filenames but
also for the ID3 tags. That means that if you have all filenames nicely formatted with a separator
character, then you can fill/change the ID3 tags with only a few mouse clicks!
The program has been set up in such a way that you can first clean up the filename and rearrange or divide
the filename into sections. After that, you select the files for which you want to edit the ID3 tags and
you're almost there! All will be explained in more detail on the next pages.
To be able to manipulate a filename in a quick and easy way, a filename should consist of at least one
section which ends with an extension. A section is a part of the filename divided by separator characters,
in case there is more than one section. The separator character will be '-'.
If there are no separator characters then the filename will be considered one section.
Note:
The program will be updated later to be able to define a separator character
by yourself (for instance the underscore '_').
Extension of a filename
When using FreeTagNavigator you will not see any fileformat extension because it would be useless to you
anyway as the program already knows what kind of file format it is dealing with. The extension will be
'.mp3'. An advantage is that you don't have to worry about altering the file format accidentally
and ending up with a wrong fileformat extension.
Note:
At the moment, only mp3's can be manipulated but will be extended with more file formats.
Program execution
To start editing your files all you need to do is go to a folder in which you have mp3's, select one and
open the Explorer context menu and select FreeTagNavigator. The program will be iniciated and read all the
appropiate files in the current directory (as mentioned before, at the moment only mp3's but this will be
extended soon).
Note:
Select only one file to start FreeTagNavigator or else you might get a warning or the program
needs more time to start up. This will be fixed in the next issue.
