ID3v1
After the creation of the MP3 standard, there appeared a problem with storing data about the file. Standalone MP3s didn't have any special method of doing this. In 1996 Eric Kemp had the idea to add a small chunk of data to the audio file, thus solving the problem. The method, now known as ID3v1, quickly became the de facto standard for storing metadata in MP3s. The format was released by Damaged Cybernetics, an underground group that specialized in cracking console gaming systems. There was no identifying information for any of the ROMS, thus an ID tagging system was created to make tracking easier. Eric and associates carried this over into mp3 files. This format was used for a number of file formats unknown at that time.
The ID3v1 tag occupies 128 bytes, beginning with the string TAG. The tag was placed at the end of the file to maintain compatibility with older media players. Some players would play a small burst of static when they read the tag, but most ignored it, and almost all modern players will correctly skip it. This tag allows 30 bytes each for the title, artist, album, and a "comment", four bytes for the year, and a byte to identify the genre of the song from a predefined list of 80 values (Winamp later extended this list to 148 values).
One improvement to ID3v1 was made by Michael Mutschler in 1997. Since the comment field was too small to write anything useful, he decided to trim it by two bytes and use those two bytes to store the track number. Such tags are referred to as ID3v1.1.
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