Optional zero padding on ID3v2 tags?

General Discussion
1

When saving an ID3v2 tag, a 2048 bytes padding is added to the tag, if not existent. I understand this is useful when tags may have future updates... but what if my tags won't be updated anymore? It's just wasting space.

So, as a suggestion, we could have an option to have zero padding with ID3v2 tags. With this option checked, we would have no padding added to new tags, and modified tags would have their padding trimmed to zero.

2

2048 Bytes and wasting space?
Asuming you are right:
If you have 1 Million of songs it would be about 2 GB of wasted space.

As you sureley have not 1 Million of songs - let's say you have 100.000 songs - you would spare about 200 MB.

I think it's wasting thoughts and not wasting time to think about this.

3

You will never know if you can use this reserved space in the future. Maybe you will find some useful additional tags like Audio-Fingerprints or Replay Gain? This little space will just speed up your next tagging process. Thats for sure. :slight_smile: :wink:

4

I don't see your point. OP gave a suggestion to make it optional for saving space. If he says he won't update his tags anymore, who are you to say he will? This wasted space may be insignificant to you, but you don't know his needs.

And even if the tags are updated again, in a rare event, if the tag needs more room, the program will simply expand the file bounds to request more space. In the worst case, a file reallocation. It's not the apocalypse.

I think it's a good suggestion, it's another option to be added to this incredible program.

5

Impressive that you registered especially for this first comment, pillipst! (In response to the very first post of gafafa) :ph34r:

6

You are so easily impressed. :rolleyes:

7

Perhaps (probably?) that option will not be provided.

But MP3 Diags claims to remove excess padding.
http://pages.citebite.com/s3f9y4h0u7luw

8

I would like to add that probably you cannot be without a little wasted space as the sector size will claim its share. And that may vary between 512 k and 4096 k

9

And I would like to update, that nowadays Windows 10 Disk Managements offers setting of a cluster size in NTFS up to 2M