Re: [Muine] Problems with UTF-8 on ID3 tags

[Brian Kerrick Nickel <kerrick cox net>]

On Fri, 2004-06-25 at 22:16 -0300, Carlos Laviola wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Being from Brazil, I own some albums that have accents either in the
> song titles, the album's name or the band's name itself.  I usually tag
> my rips with the accents, but muine seems to have a problem with this,
> as it can be seen on the following screenshot:
> 
> http://laviola.org/muine_utf8_bug.png
> 
> On this screenshot, the song right beneath "Mateus Enter" should appear
> as "O Cidad�do Mundo" or, if you can't see accents, "O Cidadao do
> Mundo" with a tilde over the 2nd 'a' in "cidadao".  As you can see, the
> same happens to all other songs with accents in them; strangely, muine
> seems to try to convert what already is in Unicode to Unicode again,
> since I get the same output with "iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t UTF-8
> testing.txt", where testing.txt contains the id3 tags as displayed by
> id3v2. Here you can see that the song is indeed tagged in UTF8:
> 
> $ id3v2 -l 02-chico_science_e_nacao_zumbi-o_cidadao_do_mundo.mp3 > testing.txt
> $ file testing.txt
> testing.txt: UTF-8 Unicode text
> 
> Here are the relevant snippets from testing.txt:
> 
> $ cat testing.txt
> id3v1 tag info for 02-chico_science_e_nacao_zumbi-o_cidadao_do_mundo.mp3:
> Title  : O Cidad�do Mundo             Artist: Chico Science & Nacao
> Zumbi
> Album  : Afrociberdelia                  Year: 0   , Genre: Other (12)
> Comment: lame --preset standard -Z       Track: 2
> id3v2 tag info for 02-chico_science_e_nacao_zumbi-o_cidadao_do_mundo.mp3:
> TIT2 (Title/songname/content description): O Cidad�do Mundo
> 
> $ iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t UTF-8 testing.txt
> id3v1 tag info for 02-chico_science_e_nacao_zumbi-o_cidadao_do_mundo.mp3:
> Title  : O Cidadão do Mundo             Artist: Chico Science & Nacao
> Zumbi
> Album  : Afrociberdelia                  Year: 0   , Genre: Other (12)
> Comment: lame --preset standard -Z       Track: 2
> id3v2 tag info for 02-chico_science_e_nacao_zumbi-o_cidadao_do_mundo.mp3:
> TIT2 (Title/songname/content description): O Cidadão do Mundo
> 
> I'm running muine 0.6.3 on Debian unstable (Debian version 0.6.3-1) and
> I have the following locale configuration:
> 
> $ locale
> LANG=en_US.UTF-8
> LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
> LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
> (...)
> LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
> 
> Any hints?
> 
> Thank you,
> Carlos.

Hello Carlos,

I think the diagnosis may be the opposite. Muine is functioning fine
while the tagging software is operating incorrectly. Unless your tags
are formatted with ID3v2.4 (Most taggers use 2.3), your tags can't be in
the UTF-8 format. The earlier versions of ID3v2 only supported ISO-8859-
1 and UTF-16. Here is probably what happened. You entered your UTF
characters into your tagging software. Your tagging software then
(incorrectly) stored the frame with the ISO-8859-1 flag rather than
converting it to UTF-16 and storing it with the UTF-16 flag. When
Muine's metadata function loaded, it recognized that there was a ISO-
8859-1 frame and converted it to UTF-8 for rendering, thus causing the
problem. If this is the case, a bug should be filed against the tagging
software.

- Brian