id3v2 version downgrade

[gary+taglib at realify.com]

On Sat, Jan 08, 2005 at 02:19:56AM +0100, Scott Wheeler wrote:
> On Friday 07 January 2005 3:47, gary+taglib at realify.com wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Does anyone know of an easy way, using taglib or otherwise, to downgrade
> > a file's id3v2 tag from version 2.4 to 2.3? Looking at the taglib API,
> > the only way I can figure out to do it is to read the tag in frame by
> > frame, decode each frame, create a new frame with the same contents but
> > the intended id3v2 version, and use these new frames to create a new tag
> > to replace the old one. There's got to be an easier way though!
> 
> Nope -- TagLib doesn't support writing to ID3v2.3.  It seems rather silly to, 
> actually since the ID3v2.4 standard came out several years before TagLib 
> did...

And I fully agree with you :) but yet, there's still plenty of broken
apps out there... In this case, though, it turns out that iTunes was
unhappy with the UTF-8 text encoding on my tags, not the ID3 version.
With UTF-8, iTunes would report that the mp3 had a valid ID3v2.4 tag,
but then not see any of the contents (artist, album, year, etc.).
Reencoding all the tags to UTF-16 seems to have solved the problem.
iTunes now reads all the fields without a hitch. Time to go bug Apple
for a bugfix I guess...

Thanks,
Gary