Hi...I have been faffing around in flash via wine - which works really, really well, btw. Anyhows I have bashed together a streaming mp3 player for a friend of mine. The music is a tad obscure and sung in sanskrit. Now I thought it would be a fab idea to include info about what each song was about by sucking out id3 comment tag info and placing it after artist and song as it scrolls along. Trouble is, comment seems to accept 30 characters. is this absolutely the limit? Is there any way around it using MP3 - I know, flash, mp3 its all as proprietary as Bill Gates loo roll...but if anyone can help I would be really grateful.It would be so elegant,easy and nice if i could just plonk the info in with the id3 tags...thanks in advance for any help rendered.

id3v1 uses fixed-length strings. There's no way that I know of to overcome this (There is something called an "advanced tag" hack which doubles the length of the field, but most programs do not support it.) Also, id3v1 was designed to use iso-8859-1 encoding only, and the use of any non-western languages requires the reading program to interpret the string in the correct encoding. Programs that are unaware of the encoding used will display only garbage.

id3v2 tags however can have strings of any length and encoding. It should solve all your problems if your streaming program can handle it.

id3 on Wikipedia

Thanks mate! I did some gui point and click in easytag preferences and lo and behold...success on a plate. I really, really appreciate your help. Thank you very much indeed.