Yet Another MP3 Tool User's Guide: A GNOME program to organize your MP3s
Prev | Chapter 1. Introduction | Next

# About MP3 and ID3

I suppose nowadays nearly everybody knows what mp3s are and if you downloaded this program without knowing it, you want to organize something and don't know what it is ? ;-)

But shortly:

MPEG (Moving Pictures Experts Group) Layer 3 is an audio format which is, especially in the internet, quite common because it reduces a file to about 10% of it's original size. For more information visit the page of the mp3 inventor, the Fraunhofer Institute at http://www.iis.fhg.de/amm/techinf/layer3/index.html.

A ID3 TAG is a method of storing additional information to an mp3 file. In fact there are just 128 Bytes appended to the file and the beginning is marked with the word "TAG". It has space for a description of the Title, the Artist, the Album, a Comment (each with 30 characters), the Year (4 characters) and the Genre (one of 126).

Currently YAMT supports only this quite limited ID3v1 TAGs, but since ID3v2 seems to be really cool it will hopefully be implemented later.

If you are interested in the technical details of ID3v1 and ID3v2 have a look at http://www.id3.org

Prev | Home | Next
Introduction | Up | Features