Thanks, Joern.  This is extremely encouraging!  Looks like I'm be much 
closer to building my jukebox than I thought I'd be less than a week 
into it.

I did some more investigation and indeed, Squeak will play *some* files 
with id3v2 tags.  The ones it's choking on seem to be ones where there 
is binary data in the id3v2 header.  Specifically, an MPEG frame starts 
with 11 bits, all set to 1.  The files where it has trouble all seem to 
have this in the id3v2 header.  I have compiled the latest libmpeg3 on 
my Linux box.  I will sic it on some of these more complex tags and see 
how it does.  The library seems to be doing a blind seek for 0xFF and 
finding it in the binary id3v2 header.  I'll be looking at that next.

The irony of all of this is that my collection is 99% ripped and encoded 
by me from my own CD collection.  I'm not much into trading copyrighted 
stuff.  I do have a few rarities, though, and those are the dogs.

On a related note, I did some looking into Ogg Vorbis today and it has 
come a *long* way since the last time I looked at it.  I did a 
side-by-side comparison btw lame 3.8.x and oggenc rc3 and for the same 
bitrate, the ogg sounded noticeably better.  Last time I did this, it 
sounded noticeably worse.  Additionally, the top quality ogg (-q 10) was 
indistinguishable from the wav file to my ears on a decent pair (~US$45 
Sony) of headphones.  So I may well get to work on a Vorbis plugin, 
especially since the mp3 issue should be fairly easy to fix at this point.

Joern Eyrich wrote:

>Jason,
>
>before you dive in:
>
>with the "Squeak 3.1 VM (alpha 6 build) from May 17 2001" and an Mpeg3Plugin.dll from March 15 2001 (length 244.736bytes), and an 3.2gamma-4857 image I could play two mp3s with ID3v2 tags.
>
>I believe that's the same VM/Plugin version that you use. So it might be a problem in the image, not in the plugin.
>
>Could you send me the problematic file so I can see if it works in my setup?
>
>Joern
>
>Jason Dufair wrote:
>  
>
>>I want to try and debug this, but it appears that I'm going to have to
>>learn a heck of a lot more about the nuts and bolts of Squeak first.  Is
>>the dll/so/(whatever macs use) compiled from the c source or is it
>>somehow translated to slang and compiled that way?  It would seem the
>>latter is the case, but it's hard to tell, having only really used
>>squeak for a few days.
>>
>>I'm thinking I'll first compile and test the latest libmpeg3 and see if
>>it can handle the tags.  If not, I'll see if I can work with the guy at
>>Heroine Virtual to get it patched.  If so, how difficult would it be to
>>update the Squeak plugin with the latest version of libmpeg3?  Just
>>trying to get an idea of what I'm in for.
>>    
>>