Amarok seems to do something terribly non-standard with id3 tags. As far as I can tell, it uses id3v1 as if it were id3v2. For example, I usually place the song lyrics into the comment field in my mp3s. Some ~100% of the time, they are longer than the limit on id3v1 comment fields, so if Amarok were sane (relatively, IMO refusing to use id3v2 instead of id3v1 isn't all that sane, but I probably don't know the technical details), it would at least truncate the text instead of writing the entire text into the file. But that is exactly what it does, as confirmed by mp3info, kid3 and Winamp.
It also strips out existing id3v2 data.

Is this a bug or an intentional (mis)feature for the sake of not bothering the user's pretty little head about such complexities?

What version of Amarok are you using? Since the release of the 1.4 series, Amarok only writes v2.4 tags.

Code: Select all

$ amarok --version
Qt: 3.3.7
KDE: 3.5.8
Amarok: 1.4.7


On Kubuntu 7.10