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

[Brian Kerrick Nickel <kerrick cox net>]

On Sat, 2004-06-26 at 03:49 -0300, Carlos Laviola wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 25, 2004 at 11:14:47PM -0700, Brian Kerrick Nickel wrote:
> > On Sat, 2004-06-26 at 00:28 -0300, Carlos Laviola wrote:
> > > On Fri, Jun 25, 2004 at 06:37:18PM -0700, Brian Kerrick Nickel wrote:
> > > > 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.
> > > 
> > > It's unlikely, since both id3v2 and grip, the program I originally used
> > > to rip my stuff, use id3lib (http://www.id3lib.org), which is pretty
> > > standards-compliant.  But in case it's really the tagging software's
> > > fault, do you know how I can check for these flags?
> > 
> > Sure, Take a look at tagged file in a hex editor like ghex.
> > 
> > The ID3 structure is pretty simple. You're going to want to search for a
> > string TIT2 (maybe TIT1). It will be followed by 6 bytes you can ignore,
> > then one byte which is the encoding byte.
> > 
> > If set to 0x00, it is ISO-8859-1 and must not contain UTF characters
> > information.
> > If set to 0x01 or 0x02 it should be a form of UTF-16.
> > If set to 0x03, it is indeed UTF-8 and Muine's ID3 decoder is in error.
> 
> You were right.  It was set to 0x00.  Changing it to 0x03 makes it work
> flawlessly.
> 
> Any suggestions as to how I might do this change to all of my songs at
> once, or at least name a program which does proper encoding checks?

Unfortunately I do not. I'd recommend easytag because it can
automatically fill in tags from filenames and whatnot, but it appears to
have the same problem. I'm sure commercial programs like Windows Media
Player, iTunes, WinAMP and the like support proper tagging, but that's
probably impractical. I'll email the easytag dev about fixing it.

-Brian