hi developers,

I was recommended to use foobar2000 cause it can correctly display the strings in the ID3 and file names written in cyrillic.
This is unfortunately only partialy the case on my system.
I am using w2k pro, german localization, standard language german.
The strings in russian language from ID3 are shown as Àóêöûîí in foobar2000. They are shown correct only if I put the tags myself.
Would be nice if you were interested to fix this behaviour in foobar2000, that would animate me to through winamp over board.

ID3 tags contain characters encoded using current ANSI codepage on the system that wrote them, but no information about codepage used, so they can't be decoded on a system using different codepage; blame the person who tagged those files.
Or set your system codepage to russian, read them, and rewrite tags.

Just a sidenote... it looks like it should here, although only when encoding in browser set to cp-1251:



Great band btw.

The codepage can be defined by the mp3 format, did I understand you right?
I suppose there is a lot of mp3 software that don't set the codepage, cause I have the problem with all of my russian mp3s.
Maybe you could build in an option to handle such a case with a default codepage set by user - in case a char is above the 127 boundary foobar2000 would use this codepage to display this char.



which software would you suggest to do this easy and quickly? I have a couple of hundred files, this would be a bit tiring to do it by hand.

thx for help

I wanted to do an example to show a word unreadable

Perhaps 'reload info from files' and then 'rewrite tags from database' in foobar, using apev2 tags this time.
Or tag.exe with '--force apev2'.

No. The code page cannot be defined by the tag. The point was that the tags contain plain ANSI strings, with no identifying code page information. They are encoded however the originating system was configured. ID3v2 *does* support UTF-8 and UTF-16, but most applications only support ISO-8859-1. (And persist in shoving all sorts of encodings in ANSI field. Lame coders, lame standard.)


1) Set your system language to Russian.
2) Load all of your broken tagged files and reload info
3) Rewrite tags from database
4) Optionally reset your codepage

Tags should now be nice APEv2 with UTF-8 strings, without that nasty code page dependent ANSI mess.

thx for explanations.
I found foobar's masstagger, a realy nice thing.