In a March 2004 post on this list, this little snippet came up:

On Mar 30, 2004, at 2:17 PM, Glenn Maynard wrote:

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• There's no support for reading Xing/LAME VBR header tags in libmad,

*>>* but *>>* the code to do it can be found in madplay (see tag.c). *>* *>* Note that this code doesn't parse "Info" tags, which are just Xing *>* tags but are usually written for CBR files (probably to not confuse *>* players which assume existance a Xing tag means VBR).

Actually since version 0.15.1b, it does -- at your suggestion, in fact. It also reads any LAME tag following the Xing info, which contains Replay Gain information.

Now I have version 0.15.1b, but I don't know how to access this data - specifically, the computed length of the file.

Also, I read somewhere that support for ID3v2 headers was being built into MAD. Is there any truth in this, or should I be doing it on my own?