I'm not sure if there are any chinese music fans here, but I was wondering how do you tag the chinese songs that you rip from the CD? I'm new to this. Thanks.

This is what I do if I can't type the characters myself. I look for album info on the web, and copy-and-paste it into the tags.

Vorbis supports UTF-8 Unicode, so Chinese is not a problem.

edit: With MP3, I'd suggest using APEv2 tagging, which also supports UTF-8.

For MP3 and AAC files, I use iTunes. It support both unicode filename and tag.

edit: spelling

So you can't do that with id3v2? or even v1?

I want to use EAC to do the ripping though.

Chinese tag is the most complex things in this world

There are:

1) Traditional Chinese (BIG5)
2) Simplified Chinese (GB)
3) Unicode (UTF-8)
4) Non-standard BIG5 Japanese Character

I've tried using 'freedb' and I got BIG5 or GB only, seems no one (or freedb?) use UTF-8 for the ID3v1 or v2.

As my preference, I stick to foobar2000 and use APEv2 tag so temporary quite happy with it, but the trade off is ... I've to rework the TAG after ripping.

Also ID3v1 or v2 seems having trouble with Chinese (it seems to capitalize the 1st character).

Don't feel too bad. In Japanese we have Shift JIS, EUC, and UTF. I use UTF-16 in my ID3v2 tags for mp3 on my iRiver. My Vorbis comments are UTF-8 by default which is nice . My APEv2 tags on my WavPack files have no problems with UTF-8 either.

If you don't have a portable APEv2 is your easiest bet IMO.

You can use any program you want in the ripping process and use iTunes as a tagger.
I also use EAC to rip tracks from CD. Then use iTunes encode them to AAC (LAME for MP3) and tag them.

My chinese reading capability is rather limited. Yet, I do want the titles in Traditional or Simplified depending on the album. So I need to enter them as Unicode in order to get the portable player to display it? I'm sorry, I don't quite understand the Big5, GB, UTF-8 and non-stard Big5 Japanese Character.

Also just wondering, what kind of tags does MP3 and AAC support besides id3v1 or 2?

Natively none. Well mp3 none and AAC none unless wrapped in an MPEG-4 container. Both however can use APEv2. Good luck getting much besides foobar2000 and Winamp with in_mpg123 to read the mp3 with APEv2. I've not tried AAC with APEv2 but I think foobar2000 would read it and I'm really sure Winamp wouldn't.

APEv2 tags are the monkey audio tags? I want my tags to be readable by my portable audio player though.

Then your only choice is ID3v2. Find out if your player supports Unicode, and choose an appropriate encoding, and tag version. (UTF/UCS/whatever, ID3v2.xxxx)

Can someone answer my post above? It's about the Big 5, GB, UTF-8 and non standard Big5 Japanese Character.

Store all your tags in Unicode, using ID3v2 v2.3.0 or v2.4.0 tags. Foobar2000 supports writing tags in Unicode.

If you use Windows XP, you can edit tag within properties window (right-click on music file and choose "properties") It supports unicode tag. It works with my iRiver IFP-190TC.



I've never found any tagging program that allow me to choose encoding. I would like to know if there is one.

I'm away for a while ...

What do you want to know?

The most difficult part of Chinese is Big5, it was created in the very beginning so it's inadquate. It contains some windows frames characters and also signs and Japanese character. The worse thing is the 'officical standard' only have contain 'popular' Chinese character, some rarely used and Japanese characters not included.

When someone released the improved version, nobody make a popular or legitimate 'new standard', causing lot of confusions.

This is what I want to know:

This is what I want to know:

Then you have already been told what to do. Then you have already been told what to do.

Big 5 is an encoding of the Traditional Chinese characterset. GB is an encoding of the Simplified Chinese character set.

Unicode is the character set to rule them all. It includes both Traditional and Simplified Chinese. Use it. Be happy.

Ok, thanks for clarifying that for me. Some dude said that in unicode, the first character is capitalized? What does he mean by that? The first character is bigger than the other characters?