APEv1 specification

This is how information is laid out in an APEv1 tag:

The only difference between APEv1 and APEv2 is that APEv1 has no header. Therefore, it is strongly recommended that developers adopt v2 instead of v1 as standard tagging system for their formats.

APE Tag Item 1	10.. bytes
APE Tag Item 2	10.. bytes
...	10.. bytes
APE Tag Item n-1	10.. bytes
APE Tag Item n	10.. bytes
APE Tags Footer	32 bytes

APE tags items should be sorted ascending by size. When streaming parts of the APE tags can be dropped to reduce danger of drop outs between titles. This is not a MUST, but STRONGLY recommended. Actually the items should be sorted by importance/byte, but this is not feasible. Only break this rule if you add less important small items and you don't want to rewrite the whole tag. An APE tag at the end of a file (strongly recommended) must have at least a footer, a APE tag in the beginning of a file (strongly unrecommended) must have at least a header.