Hydrogenaudio Forums > Question on ID3V2 support

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ezra2323

Nov 28 2003, 14:20

What do the following mean?

*Write ISO-8559-1 tags

*Write byte order marker in all strings

*Decode and write ISO 8559-1 tags

I know ID3V2 tags are considered bad, but my Creative Nomad Zen Xtra uses these to organize and that's where I listen to my MP3s. ID3V1 tags are clipped and APE tags are not recognized. How do I write ID3V2 tags with Foobar, or can I??

ezra2323

Nov 28 2003, 14:22

Never mind, found where to write ID3V2 tags in Foobar.

Xenion

Nov 28 2003, 14:25

QUOTE(ezra2323 @ Nov 28 2003, 09:22 PM)

Never mind, found where to write ID3V2 tags in Foobar.

it would anyway be interessting if anyone could give answers to you questions from the first post and give recommendations maybe.

*Write ISO-8559-1 tags
*Write byte order marker in all strings
*Decode and write ISO 8559-1 tags

Prodoc

Nov 28 2003, 16:19

Collected from the forum:

* Write ISO-8859-1 tags instead of UFT-16

QUOTE

...ISO-8859-1 is a subset of Unicode (UTF-16 is a Unicode Transformation Format, which simply means that it's a way to encode Unicode characters). Unicode aims to encode all the characters in the world.
ISO-8859-1 contains characters mostly used in "Western" countries, so Asian, Arabic, Cyrillic, ... characters are missing.

* Write byte order marker (BOM) in all strings

QUOTE

WMP, Winamp, and dBPowerAMP, along with many, many players that support UTF-16 ID3v2 tags, don't like it if I include a byte order marker (BOM) in the string. (As the standard specifies.)
iPod (or is it iTunes?) requires it.
The specification also includes a means of indicating the endianness of the UTF-16 strings in the text encoding field, but one would gather from id3lib that this indicator is not used/supported. ID3lib ignores it, relying solely on the BOM.
Writing without BOM becomes confusing.
...
I've changed it to write little-endian Unicode strings when excluding the BOM. EDIT: And now it will write little-endian with BOM. Doesn't seem to fix dbpa reading, and it causes WMP to spit out this error: "Windows Media Player cannot find the specified file."

Moneo

Nov 28 2003, 17:07

QUOTE(ezra2323 @ Nov 28 2003, 09:20 PM)

*Decode and write ISO 8559-1 tags

You forgot the "using system codepage" bit.

Id3v2 standard uses ISO-8859-1 charset for writing tags, and e.g. cyrillic characters are not encluded there. To write cyrillic tags, most applications (sadly, most devs don't give a flying xiph about unicode) use windows system codepage (cp-1251 for russian), which is a 8-bit encoding.

This option has to be enabled to properly convert those (non-compliant) tags to and from unicode.

Prodoc

Nov 29 2003, 06:53

QUOTE

You forgot the "using system codepage" bit.

I couldn't find that one on the forum fast enough ;-)

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