A guided tour through ID3 esoterica
This week we turn the mics on ourselves, kind of. Lars Wikman joins the show to give us a guided tour through ID3 esoterica and the shiny new open source Elixir library he developed for us. We talk about what ID3 is, its many versions, what it aims to be and what it could have been, how our library project got started, all the unique features and failed dreams of the ID3v2 spec, how ID3v2 and Podcasting 2.0 are solving the problem differently, and how all of this maps back to us giving you (our listeners) a better experience while listening to our shows.
Matched from the episode's transcript 👇
Lars Wikman: So for your needs to ship chapters, I built out a library for decoding and encoding ID3 tags. And we focused on the 2.3 spec. I can enumerate the specs that you could possibly deal with; it’s ID3, also known as ID3v1. It was the first version, before they had a versioning scheme. Then you have ID3v2.2. I haven’t seen 2.0 or 2.1, so I don’t know if they ever shipped.