Re: [Easytag-mailing] Easytag's UTF8

[Tom Sorensen <tsorensen gmail com>]

Taglib is pretty radically different from id3lib. It also doesn't
support writing anything but id3v2.4 tags, which are not compatible
with some programs (such as anything based on id3lib). I've also
experienced some tag corruption issues with Taglib (and have filed
bugs on them), especially APE tags and ID3v1 tags.

On the other hand, id3lib is seriously outdated and doesn't appear to
be maintained anymore. And the API is just awful. There's a couple of
critical bugs in the 3.8.3 code that haven't been officially added yet
(fortunately there are patches on the SF page, but most packagers
don't include them, sadly).

Note that I'm not involved in easytag development -- I've just been
playing with both libs in the past few weeks to write my own trivial
utilities. But I wouldn't expect a switch to Taglib anytime soon --
it's a major undertaking, and unless you retain the ability to right
v2.3 tags somehow then a lot of other programs will "break".

On 10/9/05, svarog gmail com <svarog gmail com> wrote:
> Hello I have tagged about 27000+ files with easytag so thanks!!
> Forever I have been using xmms and beep media player to play my mp3s but now
> I went to try out amarok!
> And amarok won't read my utf8 encoded tags properly.
>
> I tracked this whole thing down a little bit
>
> ID3v2.3 only supports Unicode as UTF-16LE with BOM and UTF-16BE without BOM.
> UTF-8 is new to ID3v2.4 .
>
> easytag i think uses id3lib which writes id3v2.3 tags, and id3v2.3 tags only
> support UTF-16LE with BOM (i dont kow what that is) and UTF-16BE with no
> BOM. UTF-8 only works in id3v2.4.
>
> Therefore amarok which uses taglib, reads my tags broken, because they
> aren't really unicode, just with unicode stuff i the frames broken.
>
> So would it be really easy to make easytag use taglib, is it just matter of
> replacing all calls to taglib instead of the other one?? Here is some
> debugging i was doing
>
>
> Here I look at a tag written in unicode by easytag wiht id3v2
> #id3v2 -l *01*
> id3v2 tag info for Любэ - Песни о Людях - 01 - Там За Туманами.mp3:
> TIT2 (Title/songname/content description): Там За Туманами
> TPE1 (Lead performer(s)/Soloist(s)): Любэ
> TALB (Album/Movie/Show title): Песни о Людях
> TRCK (Track number/Position in set): 01
> TCON (Content type): x (255)
> TLEN (Length): 229000
>
>
> it looks good
>
> Here same file not changed with eyeD3
>
> eyeD3 *01*
>
> Любэ - Песни о Людях - 01 - Там За Туманами.mp3 [ 8.75 MB ]
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Time: 3:49      MPEG1, Layer III        [ 320 kb/s @ 44100 Hz - Joint stereo
> ]
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ID3 v2.3:
> title: Там Ðа ТÑманами               artist: ÐбÑ
> album: ÐеÑни о ÐдÑÑ                year: None
> track: 1                genre: x (id None)
>
>
>
> and those are the same characters taht show up in amarok and bunch of other
> players, but not beep-media-player
>
> the beep media player just ignores the headings, can't force ay other music
> player to do that though :[
>