Reading the D3-Tag on an mp3?

Question

Hi I bought a philips piece of trash mp3 player, that doesnt allow you to create your own custom folders-some genius decided that a better system would be to automatically sort your music according to the album name etc contained in the mp3....

problem is that most of my mp3's dont contain that data- so I am writing a program that will populate all my mp3's with the album name etc- this is where im running into a problem

ok from searching on the internet iv discovered that the last 128 bytes of an mp3 is something called a D3-Tag, which contains album title etc in the following format

128 bytes

3 bytes: Must contain TAG

30 bytes: Song's title

30 bytes: Song's artist

30 bytes: Song's album

4 bytes: Publishing year

30 bytes: Comment

1 byte: Genere-ID

now the mp3 has the info in it if I right click properties, but when I run my program those last 128 bytes are just gibberish- has the format changed at all,

Answer 1

The format you describe was the very first version of the ID3 information and was kind of a hack.This page describes the many variations of ID3 that have come into use since the first version:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID3

In short, you can't assume the ID3 information is the last 128 bytes.