APE tag

APE tags comprise one extant convention used to store information (metadata) about a given digital audio file.

Each APE tag constitutes a discrete element that describes a single attribute of the file's contents.

Each consists of a key/value pair; the key is simply a label that names the attribute, such as Year, Title, Artist, or Track Number, etc.

This allows tag editing software to avoid incorrectly displaying binary values, such as an image of album cover art, in the form of unreadable text to users.

In comparison, Vorbis comments do not have a flagging feature, so binary data cannot be easily stored in them (though this is by design).