How to get the right tag format, and ONLY the right tag format Options

[bobbydriver]

I have discovered that quite a lot of my mp3's have been hiding away APE tags when I thought I had cleaned them all up.

Looks like mp3tag was not showing me APE tags, but I'm getting confused as to how to do a proper clean up here.

What I want ideally is for all my mp3's to JUST have the ID3v2.3 tags and nothing else, but I don't understand how to achieve this.

For example a lot of them (when I enable the TAG column) in the display say

ID3v2.3(ID3v1 ID3v2.3 APEv2)

What is the significance of the bit in brackets and how do I get rid of it!

Any pointers appreciated...

[JJ Johnson]

Yes, removing tags is not at all intuitive in Mp3tag.

First, go into Tools > Options (or Ctrl-O) > Tags > Mpeg.

• Under 'Read' you generally want to check all three. If you're confident that all of your information is already in the ID3v2 tag then you can leave ID3v1 and APE unchecked, but if it's possible that some data might be in either an ID3v1 or APE tag, you'll probably want to transfer that data to the ID3v2 tag, so you'd check them all.
  
• Under 'Write' you only want ID3v2 checked. Select the radio button for the desired character set to use. I use IOS-8859-1 for simplicity and compatibility. Although it isn't quite as flexible as UTF, it encodes pretty much everything I've ever encountered, including letters with accents like acutes, graves, etc.
  
• Under 'Remove' check ID3v1 and APE.

To remove the unwanted tags, highlight the files to be worked on (or Ctrl-A to select all). If under the Read option you checked anything else beside ID3v2 then you intend to copy any data found in the ID3v1 or APE tags into the ID3v2 tag. So press Ctrl-S to Save. Then press Ctrl-R to remove the unwanted tags. This can also be accomplished by pressing the two leftmost buttons in the button bar (floppy disk then red X).

This post has been edited by JJ Johnson: Jan 17 2012, 22:14

[bobbydriver]

Brilliant that works!

Finally I understand it. You’re right it’s not very intuitive. Pesky APE tags all gone

Many many thanks