I tried to import a folder of mp3 tracks and found mp3tag 2.29 took almost a minute to import one album !!
Is there something i need to tweak, was hoping it would be much quicker.
These files have probably a lot of invalid padding (many zeros) at the beginning of the file or very big embedded cover art.
Try to remove the ID3v2 tags and re-write them via the undo feature - this should do the trick.
Best regards,
~ Florian
They do have ID3v2 tags in them, which would be at the beginning of the tracks.
It's difficult to do re-writes as i have thousands of tracks tagged this way.
I'm unsure why you would say the padding is invalid. winamp, fb2k seem to read them fairly quickly.
AFAIK, neither Winamp nor foobar2000 are detecting invalid padding. Can you provide me one of the problem files, so I can analyze them?
That is quite possible, which raises the question why detect the padding at all in mp3tag ?
As far as i understand padding is there to reduce time taken for subsequent re-wites. I think this is a good idea when small changes need to be made to lots of files at a time. Especially if they are ID3v2.
Mp3tag detects invalid padding, because otherwise it wouldn't be possible to remove the invalid padding - I'm not talking about regular padding within the ID3v2 tag boundaries here, but about invalid padding outside the tag which was added by MusicMatch IIRC.
This won't be changed.
OK, is there a tool i can use to find if an mp3 does have invalid padding ?
..now its clear what kind of padding we are talking about 
I also wonder whether i should import and mp3tag alone for some time...
does mp3tag build up a database of what it imports, so in the future its quicker to access imported albums ?
Nope and this is not planned either. 