Comment 1 for bug 180110

Thanks for your bug report, this is indeed the source these id3-related problems.

It seems that indeed id3lib has problems with maintainership (see also http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=000901c772de%24f20b9520%2401010101%40rock&forum_name=id3lib-devel ). It may be possible to create a quick fix for the 2.4 version problem in libid3, but no maintainers means trouble in the future. I see the following solutions:
(A) revive libid3
(B) convince upstream projects to use another library
(C) create a glue library that gives a libid3 API to access another library like TagLib.

I think (A) is not really feasible out of the blue. (B) would be worth a try, but 20 packages (apt-cache rdepends) are a lot. (C) may be interesting depending on the work needed and the result of (B).
I hope the C++-basedness of TagLib poses no problem for upstreams (although there are C bindings); libid3tag from the MAD project would be another alternative.

Note that how applications should handle different id3 versions is another relevant question; mp3-players aren't easily patched to support v2.4, so it may not be always the best thing to upgrade a tag to the latest version (like Rhythmbox does).