Chinese letters in ID3 tags...

macabong · 2008-07-08 06:28

In Windows XP SP2, I've chosen to install files for East Asian Language

Then problem occurs when I tag my Chinese songs using Auto-tag feature of Winamp 5.531.
Look that screenshots, tracks 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 10 were tagged by Winamp while tracks 4, 6, 8 & 9 have original tags.
I can't figure out this problem, could anyone help? thanks anyway.

Last edited by macabong (2008-07-08 06:28)

Andrew · 2008-07-08 16:10

From what I can make out by looking at the characters (I may be wrong here, as the characters just look like a kid's scribble to me! ), the artist of the Winamp tagged files is the same, but the titles are different. Could it be something to do with the characters in that particular artist's name?

BTW, have you tried ReNamer with other files whose tag you yourself edited in Winamp? Try both ID3v1 and v2 tags and see which works. Ideally, you can pick a file and try editing the following tags in Winamp manually:

1) Keep only ID3v1 (Remove v2)
2) Keep only ID3v2 (Remove v1)
3) Keep both

If it works with some other characters for Artist and Title, then the problem may be those characters in particular. Else maybe some tag version isn't handled correctly.

Let us know the results so we can analyse the issue further.

Last edited by Andrew (2008-07-08 16:12)

macabong · 2008-07-11 16:49

Hi Andrew,
I've though about your idea, mate. this is just my opinion, ReNamer does not support ID3v2, does it?
BTW, Winamp/Windows/ReNamer read meta-tags in many different ways, lolz

If I do not misunderstand, Winamp write mp3 tag in ID3v2 which sometimes ID3v1 may not be read. And ReNamer also try to read that "unreadable ID3v1"
I just think so!

Andrew · 2008-07-12 16:58

macabong, I just checked it out and this is what I found - Windows, Winamp and ReNamer give preference to the ID3v2 tag if it exists, else they display the ID3v1 tag.

ID3v1 doesn't support Unicode (Chinese characters in your case), but according to my tests, if the ID3v2 tag exists then ReNamer should use that instead without any problems. I can see that ReNamer has problems with only some of the files and not all. If ReNamer didn't have ID3v2 support at all, then it would have failed with all the files, right?

So obviously the problem lies elsewhere, which is why I told you to check with different combinations of tags.

Check this out and let me know - does ReNamer work correctly if you only keep the ID3v2 tag in those files and delete the ID3v1 tag totally? (By "totally" I mean uncheck the checkbox to include the ID3v1 tag in Winamp rather than just emptying out the tag's fields.)

Note: Delete the ID3v1 tags from a copy of those files and then test. If it works, then it's probably a bug in ReNamer and Denis might need a sample of one working and one non-working file to compare and test for himself.

den4b · 2008-07-17 14:58

Thanks for all the details guys!

The problem was in the 3-rd party ID3 libraries, which I use to read ID3 tags from MP3's. Those libraries didn't have full Unicode support. I made some modifications and it seems to work fine now, but it needs more testing. Previously, it would only recognise Unicode characters that are part of the locale ANSI character set on the system and would render all other characters as question marks. But now all Unicode characters should be handled correctly, "as they are".

Here is the latest dev version for testing: ReNamerBeta.zip

Please, try it out, and tell me how it goes, ok?

Andrew · 2008-07-17 16:14

Great work Denis! Now macabong can test it out and let us know if it works properly...

macabong · 2008-07-17 19:58

Thanks for all of your attentions.
It really works now, Denis. All of Unicode characters appear correctly as they are. No more "????" in ReNamer
I haven't tried rename many files, but i think it's fine. Thanks again.

den4b Forum

#1 2008-07-08 06:28

Chinese letters in ID3 tags...

#2 2008-07-08 16:10

Re: Chinese letters in ID3 tags...

#3 2008-07-11 16:49

Re: Chinese letters in ID3 tags...

#4 2008-07-12 16:58

Re: Chinese letters in ID3 tags...

#5 2008-07-17 14:58

Re: Chinese letters in ID3 tags...

#6 2008-07-17 16:14

Re: Chinese letters in ID3 tags...

#7 2008-07-17 19:58

Re: Chinese letters in ID3 tags...

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