Allow writing non-unicode id3v2 tags. Please., Wherein the author of the post begs the foobar2000 authors to relent. Options

[delusionn]

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?

This post has been edited by delusionn: Feb 23 2012, 22:05