The BoarderZone MP3Info application was designed to help you inspect various technical aspects of MP3 files and displays a variety of so called tags which store meta data about the music in the file.

In addition, it detects various problems which might prevent players from correctly playing the music in the file. Such problems might include unrecognized data, corrupted audio frames or inconsistent meta data in different tags.

The supported/recognized information includes:
- Audio: Technical information about the audio format of the MP3 data, such as bit- and sampling-rate etc. Supports and displays VBRI/Xing/Info headers and LAME tags.

- ID3 tags: Music meta information in form of these tags is commonly supported by a wide range of software and players. Supports the versions 1.0, 1.1, 2.2.x (including compressed meta frames!), 2.3.x and 2.4.x of the ID3 informal standard.

- Lyrics3 tags: These tags are a somewhat outdated form of storing the lyrics text of songs in MP3 files. In addition, they provide a way to specify longer texts for the artist name and track and album title, than what is possible with ID3 v.1.x tags.

- APE tags: Another way of storing (mainly text based) meta information in MP3 files which originated from a specific software and gained more support by other tools over time.

- MusicMatch tags: Yet another application specific (and by now outdated) form of music meta information.

By supporting to display some of these outdated information formats, it is possible to get at the embedded information despite the fact that many tools these days do not support them anymore. In combination with other tagging software, the data can be migrated to a more up-to-date format and isn't lost.

The viewer has a set of detectors for these different information items and just locates them in the file. This ensures a very quick overview over all that information for properly formatted MP3 files. Sometimes however, MP3 files get corrupted by inappropriate/outdated/broken tagging software or by data corruption while receiving such a file over an instable network connection (such as internet radio). To detect such problems, it is necessary to examine the whole file and verify the structure of each audio frame. This can be achieved through the Scan all operation available through the corresponding toolbar button.

Performing this on a large file can take quite some time, especially if that file is located on some location which is accessed over the network (such as a network share in windows).

After finishing the analysis, more information is displayed in the Audio tab, such as the exact duration of the entire music. In addition, more problems might get detected, which will be listed on the Problems tab (this tab will often contain only English messages).

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· only development changes