APIC tag description text

[Oliver <oliver joos freenet ch>]

Hi!

I encountered a problem with APIC tags (images within ID3 headers).
My Nokia N81 (Symbian S60 3rd) doesn't show *SOME* images, although they
have reasonable size, format and type (I use 320x320, jpg, Frontcover).
The Linux tag editor "mp3diags" (1.0.07.052) shows errors for exactly
these failing APIC tags.

I found that the problem is caused by the encoding of the description
text in these APIC tags! By default EasyTAG uses the filename of the
image as description, encoded in UTF16. If this text contains non-ASCII
characters (e.g. German ä ö ü) then errors occur. If the text is
re-encoded to ISO-8859-1 then the Nokia N81 and mp3diags have no
problems even with the special characters.

I propose that by default the description text should be empty, and/or
that the text encoding should be ISO-8859-1 if possible. The latter
would be consistent since EasyTAG already does this for other ID3 texts:
it encodes ID3 tags with ISO-8859-1 if possible, even if I choose UTF16
for tag text encoding. I don't know if this is a bug or a feature, but
it has been ok for all my use-cases so far.

regards,
+++ Oliver