Comment 7 for bug 120538

Ok, tested again, now with EasyTAG 2.1.2 (don't know what version of previous test was).
  $ ffmpeg -i /usr/share/sounds/warning.wav warning.mp3
  (...)
  $ file warning.mp3
  warning.mp3: MPEG ADTS, layer III, v1, 64 kBits, 44.1 kHz, Monaural
  $ id3v2 -2 -t 'foo' warning.mp3
  $ file warning.mp3
  warning.mp3: Audio file with ID3 version 23.0 tag, MP3 encoding
  $ easytag warning.mp3
  <shows title as 'foo'>
  <set title to 'test' and save>
  $ file warning.mp3
  warning.mp3: Audio file with ID3 version 24.0 tag, MP3 encoding
  $ id3v2 -l warning.mp3
  warning.mp3: No ID3 tag
now open in rhythmbox, it shows title='test', genre=artist=album=year='Unknown'.
edit title in rhythmbox and set it to 'test2'.
  $ file warning.mp3
  warning.mp3: Audio file with ID3 version 24.0 tag, MP3 encoding
  $ strings warning.mp3 | grep test
  test2TPE1
  $ easytag warning.mp3
  <look and see that title='test2', artist=album=genre='Unknown'
EasyTAG settings are id3v2 version 2.4 and id3v1 disabled. So it seems that EasyTAG handles 2.4 tags now, which makes it work with Rhythmbox. This is great progress.

But still, interoperability between EasyTAG and Rhythmbox was just an example. There still are tools that don't work well together. I haven't found a command-line tool that works with id3v2.4 tags in default Ubuntu repositories. And what to do with mp3 players supporting only up to a certain id3 version? Maybe relying on id3v1 for that would be ok (as mentioned in bug 180110 comment 2), provided that all (important) applications also write id3v1 if it is present / turned on. Rhythmbox appears to remove any id3v1 tag present (just tested with RB 0.11.2-0ubuntu4 and gstreamer0.10-plugins-good 0.10.6-0ubuntu4; I don't know enough about gstreamer plugins to known which do the work: id3demux, taglib, xingheader or mad -- try `gst-inspect | grep mux | grep -i 'id3\|mp3'`).