id3v2.dll Need to read mp3 info from v2 tags not v1

[ImDaFrEaK]

Hey everyone. I am on the quest to build an awesome mp3 player. I am shocked however; to learn how hard it is just to read mp3 tags. I have become extremely aggravated at the entire concept as a programmer. The only information I can find, and believe me I've been searching hard, was wrappers for dll's and dll's alll for sale. I did manage to find a code snippet that was open source that I have used to read id3v1 tags. That was great and I understand partially how it works. But what about id3v2 tags? Is it really so hard to learn how to extract the information from the mp3 tag? I mean honestly, there has to be a blueprint or a tutorial of exactly what information is saved in what bytes and even a good method for extracting it. Anyways, the only things I could find were dll's for sale which to me is stupid. I almost paid for it just to be done with it,. but what have I accomplished programmatically by using somone elses code like that. I'm sure extracting the tag does't require tons more work than the id3v1 tags did and I am willing to work on it a while to get it right. Can anyone please help me by telling me what bytes the information is stored at, where the bytes are located, and a good method for extracting them. Or better yet, help me right a simple method that will read and form a continuous string of the last 256 bytes of the mp3 file. I am sure that's about all that's required. It's only the last 128 in v1. I am using .NET 2.0 and could use any help your willing to give me. Thanks

 

[JohnH]

This is binary stuff, and info frames could be compressed and/or encrypted too... and there are different versions of the v2.

Where? From the FAQ:
It is most likely located at the beginning of the file. Look for the marker "ID3" in the first 3 bytes of the file.
If it's not there, it could be at the end of the file (if the tag is ID3v2.4). Look for the marker "3DI" 10 bytes from the end of the file, or 10 bytes before the beginning of an ID3v1 tag.

Good news: UltraID3lib, free .Net id3v2 library http://home.fuse.net/honnert/hundred/?UltraID3Lib

id3lib COM: http://id3lib.sourceforge.net/

Reference http://www.id3.org/

 

[ImDaFrEaK]

Thanks

Guess I never posted a thanks to your posts but better late than never. I have reviewed those links and they helped a lot. I wish I understood better how to build my own tagreader but basically I just used the ID3UltraLib for now. It works ok. I really want to do the tag editing myself but I fear I have a little more to learn about ripping apart files. However; I do know this. There is NOTHING I can't do with programming. If I don't know now I will learn it. So, thanks for the help. I hope to get this all figured out soon.