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Topic: Allow writing non-unicode id3v2 tags. Please. (Read 3175 times) previous topic - next topic
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Allow writing non-unicode id3v2 tags. Please.

Please consider an option to allow us to write id3v2 tags without Unicode encoding

I love Unicode.  I absolutely adore it.  My car stereo does not.  The car stereos of at least three of my friends do not.  If this were merely a computer player-related issue, I'd say "hey, write Unicode tags, it's 2012", but it's not.

The issue is how these older car stereos display id3v2 tags, and all three of it do it in the same way.  Instead of "Alva Noto - Xerrox Teion", it is displayed as "A_l_v_a_ _N_o_t_o_ _-_ _X_e_r_r_o_x_ _T_e_i_o_n_".  I take pride in the fact that my ~700 terabytes of mp3-based music is tagged correctly, meaningfully, and in accordance to my very picky specifications, and as much as it would please me if my car stereos (and those of the friends whom I run an MP3 server for) accepted Unicode data better, they simply do not, and messy display names runs counter to the entire reason I tag so pickily in the first place.

Also, given the amount of other issues that come up when I searched for "Unicode" in this forum, there are clearly other users who would be interested in writing plain ASCII data.

My primary goal is to use foobar2000 for more of my tagging work, and tag&rename for less of it, particularly because foobar2000 is better at honouring my wishes NOT to use id3v2 padding when I remove 2 GB artwork and replace it with 600x600 artwork.  Again, if all my listening was done in foobar2000 on my computer, I'd just use folder.jpg, save some space, and be done with it.  In the ugly world out there, however, many graphical car stereo systems and portable media players know what id3v2 artwork tags are, but treat folder.jpg as if it is beneath their notice, so I continue to use artwork tags.

Please won't you think of the children?

 

Allow writing non-unicode id3v2 tags. Please.

Reply #2
I really feel your pain about the car stereos, I've been thinking about introducing some kind of "write dumbed down ID3v2 tags" option for such cases, but it just occurred to me:
Why don't you just write ID3v1 tags only to files that you use with your car stereo? I'm aware that longer values will be truncated etc, but it sounds like that could be acceptable in this scenario since the car player cannot "losslessly" render text from the tags anyway?
Microsoft Windows: We can't script here, this is bat country.

Allow writing non-unicode id3v2 tags. Please.

Reply #3
Adding to the discussion, there was a point in time where foobar2000 wrote any fields which were purely ASCII text as ASCII encoded, while leaving any Unicode fields as Unicode, since the tag format allegedly supports that. Unfortunately, a number of poorly designed players, including hardware players, choked badly on that. They behaved as if the tags were actually Unicode, and displayed garbage. Come to think of it, I think iTunes may be among the players which barf on ASCII encoded ID3v2 tags, or at least tags consisting of both Unicode and ASCII fields.

Allow writing non-unicode id3v2 tags. Please.

Reply #4
I really feel your pain about the car stereos, I've been thinking about introducing some kind of "write dumbed down ID3v2 tags" option for such cases, but it just occurred to me:
Why don't you just write ID3v1 tags only to files that you use with your car stereo? I'm aware that longer values will be truncated etc, but it sounds like that could be acceptable in this scenario since the car player cannot "losslessly" render text from the tags anyway?

I synchronize tags from id3v2 to id3v1 as one of the final steps in tag normalization, so it seems the stereo is reading id3v2 tags when both are present.

Allow writing non-unicode id3v2 tags. Please.

Reply #5
I think he was suggesting to axe the ID3v2 tags entirely when preparing for your car stereo.

Allow writing non-unicode id3v2 tags. Please.

Reply #6
I always use TagScanner to convert unicode tags into plain ASCII.