Choosing an appropriate tagging format

Support
#1

I have a lot of mp3 files which i play on my iPod and home pc via iTunes. Which tagging format, ID3v2.4 UTF-8 or ID3v2.3 UTF-16, should i use?

This forum post says that ID3v2.4 UTF-8 has problems with iTunes (read the 3rd last post). However, it was written in 2006 so i was wondering if this is still true for the latest iTunes.

Essentially I want the tagging format to have full compatibility with iTunes and iPods. Some of my music has non-english characters. I also want the format to be efficient meaning that it takes up the least amount of space for text, album art, etc.

#2

is still the format with the best support as V2.4 has not been adopted by all players and stuff.

#3

How about the file size of ID3v2.4 UTF-8 and ID3v2.3 UTF-16, which produces the smaller size?

Do you know if iTunes still has problems with ID3v2.4?

#4

I do not know whether and which version of iTunes has which problems with v2.4. I only see that this forum frequently features questions about v2.4 and that the general notion is "leave it alone".
Talking about sizes: we are talking about a couple kbytes if at all. Any savings there would probably eaten up by the cluster size of your hard disc of by leaving out a duplicate track. Or by reverting to v2 which leaves out such space consuming tags like albumart.
So: stay with v2.3 utf-16 and you are fine.

#5

I can say that I use "ID3v2.3 utf-16" for all my mp3 files and they work perfectly in ITUNES (latest verison), foobar2000, winamp, WMP, and SqueezeboxServer. I actually only use ITUNES (for portables), foobar2000 (on computer) and SqueezeboxServer (for serving my squeezeboxes at home). But again, no issues with tags.