If there is anything I've learned from Apple and Microsoft, it's that users don't care about technical details that much. Regular users love easy, manageable abstractions even if they are somewhat broken. It's the geeks that complain about missing details and they are by far the minority.

So when you're trying to create an end-user application like AudioMan, you have to consider your audience. Do people really care about the difference between MP3's id3v1 and id3v2 and all of their versions? Heck no. In fact, they are probably confused by references to it in tools like Winamp (which has the worst edit tag dialog for usability). It would be like a browser showing you which HTML, JavaScript and CSS versions a page was written in. 99.999% of regular people just don't care.

That's why I'm going to hide those details from them in AudioMan. If a geek is really that concerned about minute details of tags there are plenty of picky tools written by picky geeks that do that. Most of the ones I've seen aren't intuitive at all, which is my best guess as to why no one has heard of a mainstream tag editor for MP3 files.

iTunes doesn't do very much automatic tag editing, even though it would probably get the product more users. My best guess is that they are afraid that if they have features like that the record companies will see it as tacit approval of illegal downloading. Apple is tip-toeing around the record companies as it is. It's all garbage though -- people just want to be in control of their files.

In AudioMan you'll write the details for the file in a small, set number of fields and it writes them in both id3v1 and id3v2 for MP3s (we are also looking to support other formats like WMA, OGG, Real audio, AAC). When it reads files, the fields in the id3v2 tag get priority because they can be longer and more descriptive. That's about it. The list of supported fields might increase over time but they will be relegated to an advanced tab or something similar .... something out of the way of most people. It's funny, the fields used in id3v1 (artist name, album name, track name, year, genre, comment, track number) were good enough but they just weren't long enough.

id3v2 is one of the most frustratingly incompatible stardards I've ever read, even though it was supposed to be designed to be extendable. Maybe I just haven't read enough standards yet. :) It will take a while to fully support all of the versions in AudioMan, if ever. We'll just do it one field at a time, starting with the basic seven from id3v1. If users want to see other fields we'll gladly take that feedback.