but the point is, emplode saw the offset at 1540. its the same track so... in theory, shouldn't all the parameters found be the same in both tag files?

edit: whoops. i'm dumb. it was mp3tofid that saw the offset at 1540. i have found that the files that were failing were because of un-standard hidden id3v2 tags, which i promptly erased. everything is fine now.