CODEWITHSUNDEEP
wavchunksid3id3v2riff
Usernamed
Usernamed

Reputation: 53

What is the 8 byte header/tag before the main ID3v2 header in .WAV files?

I am trying to implement some of the ID3v2.4 specification, e.g. some documentation from here.

When editing the tags for some .WAV files via the software Audacity or MP3tag, inspecting the byte stream afterwards I can see there is actually a small tag before the main ID3 header and frame information.

It is an 8 byte sized header that appears to follow the format id3 xx\0\0, where xx is a 16 bit value in Little Endian format that seems to be the size information of the data from the main ID3 header onwards and \0\0 are two NULL bytes.

It may be that the two NULL bytes are actually part of the total size information as well, but I haven't attempted to write that much data to check that. It may be that it is a 4 byte size value like in the main ID3 header, but I would like to confirm this.

I cannot see a mention of this in the spec, is this part of another spec? Deleting this 8 byte header will result in Audacity and MP3tag not understanding the tag anymore.

Audacity version: 3.2.4 (this actually writes ID3v2.3 tags); MP3tag version: 3.19.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 137

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