Well, at the time that I started working on TagLib it was more or less intended as an id3lib rewrite. Someone else came along that was actually interested in continuing to maintain the current id3lib tree and he's now functioning as the maintainer. It's also worth noting that most of the id3lib users at this point are on Windows rather than Unix.

That said there's been very little improvement made in id3lib in the last several years. The API is ugly and inconcistant and the implementation is full of hacks. There have been bugfixes here and there, but the code really was at the point that major portions of it need to be rewritten for it to be maintainable.

But in maintaining id3lib I learned what it did write and what it did wrong and incorperated that into TagLib. I also got a pretty good feel for what users are looking for in such a library.

It's also worth noting that TagLib has a wider goal than id3lib -- it supports MP3s, Ogg Vorbis files and FLAC files (and in fact makes it so that the same code will work for all three formats).

As for the things still relying on id3lib -- well, based on the feedback that I've heard people would love to be able to not rely on id3lib and I expect that many of these tools will switch to TagLib. If not, well, this is a "behind the scenes" piece of the framework and can easily coexist with id3lib.

Thank you for your answer, and thank you for TagLib!

I would like to say thank you to wheels for making TagLib. We have been using it in amaroK for quite some time, and it has fully lived up to our expectations.

Without TagLib our playlist handling wouldn't be as snappy as it is. Also, the lib has been quite reliable for us, and when we had the odd problem with it, wheels has always been quick with fixing things.

I have been trying kde 3.2 from beta1 and had been frustrated when the SuSE rpms keep on asking for taglib. I had tried on rpmseek and rpmfind without success. I guess this entry should have been in place long ago.

There were two beta releases that corresponded to the KDE 3.2 betas. The second beta was packaged by SUSE and is available here:

ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/supplementary/KDE/update_for_9.0/base/taglib-0.96-0.i586.rpm

Well thanks for the information. Anyway i have downloaded taglib and also i have downloaded the rc1 of kde 3.2. juk has started workin now.

> I guess this entry should have been in place long ago.

I'm not convinced that libraries which KDE depends on are appropriate to be listed on kde-apps.org.

Yeah, I couldn't decide whether to list it here or not, but (a) freshmeat was down and (b) apps.kde.com had a lot of this type of stuff, so I decided to put it here too...