Re: APIC tag description text

[Oliver <oliver joos freenet ch>]

Am Mittwoch, den 13.03.2013, 00:08 +0000 schrieb David King:
> File 5 seems fine, as the warning mentions that there is no ID3v2.3 tag 
> present, which is expected for a file with only a v2.4 tag. File 4 seems 
> to show evidence of a bug, but I looked at the description string in the 
> file and it seems to be correct (UTF-16 little-endian). I will try to 
> test this more when I have the time, as I would consider my results to 
> be inconclusive at this stage.

I checked the test files with hexdump against specs on id3.org. All
fields look correct and correctly encoded as UTF-16 or ISO-8859-1, but:

> ID3v2.3 allows ISO-8859-1 and UCS-2 (UTF-16 with a BOM, in practice), so 
> there is either a bug in EasyTAG while writing UTF-16 fields in ID3v2.3 
> or a bug in whatever is reading those fields, and I am currently not 
> sure which. This is unlikely to be isolated to APIC description fields, 
> as much of the tag writing code is common among all fields, so I would 
> rather not change any behaviour in EasyTAG until the bug is found.

IMO the actual bug is in mp3 players/tools like Symbian phones, causing
them to fail upon APIC descriptions with UTF-16 characters! MP3 Diags
knows such nasty facts and reports them. EasyTAG is absolutely correct
according to ID3 specs! Nevertheless its results fail eventually. That's
why I would not fix it by re-encoding UTF-16 APIC descriptions, but only
change the default text from <filename> to empty.

ATM I use cmdline tool "eyeD3" to mass-clear APIC descriptions.
Be warned: eyeD3 0.7.1 also has unicode problems when writing non-empty
APIC descriptions.

With regards,
+++ Oliver