APE Tag Item

From Hydrogenaudio Knowledgebase
Revision as of 16:09, 21 October 2005 by DEATH (talk | contribs)

An APE tag item is a value assigned by a key.

Member of APE Tag Version 2.0


Note:

  • APE Tags Item Key are case sensitive.
  • Nevertheless it is forbidden to use APE Tags Item Key which only differs in case.
  • And nevertheless Tag readers are recommended to be case insensitive.
  • Every Tag Item Key can only occures (at most) once. It is not possible to transmit a Tag Key multiple time to change it contents.
  • Tags can be partially or complete repeated in the streaming format.
    This is to make it possible to display artist and title if you missed the start of the transmission.
    It is recommended to transmit very important information like artist / album / title every 2 minutes and additional 5...10 seconds before the end. Be careful and don't transmit these information too often or during passages with high bitrate demand to avoid unnecessary drop-outs.


Size of the Item Value, Bits 0...7
Size of the Item Value, Bits 8...15
Size of the Item Value, Bits 16...23
Size of the Item Value, Bits 24...31

32 bits Length len of the assigned value in bytes

Item Flags, Bits 0...7
Item Flags, Bits 8...15
Item Flags, Bits 16...23
Item Flags, Bits 24...31

32 bits Item flags
Item Key m bytes Item key, can contain ASCII characters from 0x20 (Space) up to 0x7E (Tilde)
0x00 1byte Item key terminator
Item Value len bytes Item value, can be binary data or UTF-8 string