[TriLUG] MP3 ID3 tag removal

[Jeff Jackowski]

On Thu, 5 Jun 2003, Chris Hedemark wrote:

>On Thursday, June 5, 2003, at 05:02 PM, bp wrote:
>
>> Could I ask why?  Just curious.  It's rare that some actually want to 
>> remove data from something like an ID3 tag...
>
>(just speculating) there are still some early MP3 implementations out 
>there that seem to choke on ID3 tags.  This is why, for example, 
>OpenBSD project's mp3s don't have ID3 tags.

My MPEG audio player uses mpg123, Cajun 3.0.x, and a small RedHat 6.x with
some modification to rc.sysinit. I'm avoiding upgrading it until I can get
a new larger hard drive to replace the full 6.4GB notebook drvie (at the
time, a 20GB drive was quite pricey) that is used now. Just doesn't seem 
worth the effort to upgrade the software sooner. Next time, I'll try using 
one of those really small distributions.

I found the problem was that mp3's I've encoded recently include what
mpg123 thinks is junk. It doesn't seem to be related to the ID3 tags, so
removing them didn't help after all (but thanks for the responses!). I
just figured that since more data was going into the tags now, it might
cause the problem. But something else changed, too.

mpg123 still plays back the files just fine. It also reports the junk 
using stderr, which makes Cajun fail when I use the display in the car. 
Using the console display so I can see what I'm doing outside of the car, 
Cajun does not fail. That made me think my power supply was at fault, but 
I instead found that it puts out a very clean 5 volts.

So, I patched Cajun to fix the problem, then fixed the patch (with help
since I don't know Perl) because it didn't work. Now it works fine.  :-)

-- 
Jeff Jackowski
        http://ro.com/~jeffj/