Is it possible to add custom metadata tags to music files?

Question

I am working on a music player application and I'm not happy with the current standard for music tags. I would like to extend on the current ones. Is it possible to add custom metadata tags to audio files (MP3, OGG, FLAC, WAV)? Obviously only my application could read this metadata. Would adding custom metadata corrupt the files so they can't be played correctly by other players?

Answer 1

Yes, most tagging formats support custom tags.

ID3 allows TXXX.

FLAC and Vorbis Comments both allow tags with any name (it's not really prescribed in the same way ID3 is).

You can do it with MP4 if you use XMP to contain the tags: How can I embed metadata into a custom XMP field with exiftool?

Any other software that cannot work because a custom tag is set has bigger problems!