ID3v1 Metadata

The introduction of ID3v1 is here present on ID3.org.

Structure

The structure of ID3v1 is very simple, it's a fixed size of 128 bytes at the end of music file:

Size(bytes) Name        Description
3           Header      Fixed header: TAG
30          Title
30          Artist
30          Album
4           Year
28-30       Comment
(1)         Track Flag  If this byte is 0, means the following byte is track
                        index.   
(1)         Track
1           Genre

Just read all the 128 bytes data and parse it by the position.

Encoding

This is a fucking thing: Windows using the different codec to write information. So as many other applications. And here's the point: there's no standard text codec for ID3v1. You need to using the prefer codec for different countries and area.