Hi, first post here, since I found most my answers from searching this forum, but I just can't find an answer to these problems. I have too much to ask here, hopefully it's not confusing. Kinda stressed out after extensive searching for this and not finding an answer. My knowledge of Asian character encoding is not great, so please bear with me. Here it goes.

I have used Winamp previously to tag my mp3s and it works perfectly on my H300. I use Windows XP's East Asian Language Pack (currently set to Chinese Hong Kong S.A.R.). After I discovered how much superior foobar is, I started using this program to tag my mp3s with foobar's id3v2 plugin. However, any Asian characters tagged with this program freezes my H300, and requires a reset. I have tried the following methods:

Always write ISO-8859-1: on
Write byte order mark (BOM) in all strings: greyed
Decode and write ISO-8859-1 tags system codepage (non-standard): on
Write tags without padding: on

This method, I can see Traditional Chinese (Big5?) characters in both foobar and Winamp. Japanese and Korean displays fine on foobar, but not Winamp (this part I don't care). However, whenever I click "reload info from file," the Japanese and Korean displays "?" on foobar. My H300 crashes.

Always write ISO-8859-1: off
Write byte order mark (BOM) in all strings: on
Decode and write ISO-8859-1 tags system codepage (non-standard): off
Write tags without padding: on

foobar reads this no problem, however Winamp reads it as gibberish (including Trad. Chinese). H300 reads file name only.

Basically, how do I make foobar display Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean properly even after I click "reload info from file" without it changing back to "???". Can this also be done for my H300? Is unicode the answer to this? If so, what settings to I have to make for my id3v2 plugin? If unicode is the answer, can I use Big5 for Trad. Chinese, and unicode for Japanese/Korean so that foobar AND my H300 display properly?

My Chinese/Japanese/Korean tagged file names are displayed fine on Windows XP itself. What encoding is it using? Can I use that for foobar, so that my H300 can read it?

Oh, I use the Arial Unicode MS font, if that helps at all.

Thanks in advance.

Have you tried seeing what another program like mp3tag (http://www.mp3tag.de)? It may be that Winamp only writes out western character encodings which your H300 can read. Also, have you made sure other tags like APE tags are not being attached to your mp3s?

You might want to ask around at http://www.MisticRiver.net since they are the iRiver specialists.

I tried mp3 tag tools, but I find tagging with foobar is more convenient. I had my East Asian Language pack installed, and set my language option to Traditional Chinese (HK SAR), so I think Winamp is tagging in Big5. I was thinking that I set something wrong with 1 or more of the 4 options in the id3v2 tag plugin on foobar that caused my H300 to crash. I do go to MisticRiver.net.

I think I solved my problem. I had Always write ISO-8859-1 tags instead of UTF-16 on. I just figured out (from Firefox's character encoding option) that ISO-8859-1 is for Western language and that UTF-16 is for Unicode. Anyways, can someone tell me what these options are for? Which should be kept on and off if I were to use Unicode? I currently have them all on, but the first option: Always write ISO-8859-1 tags instead of UTF-16.

- Write byte order mark (BOM) in all strings
- Decode and write ISO-8859-1 tags system codepage (non-standard)
- Write tags without padding

This is required by the standard, except for the newer (v2.4, I think) UTF-16BE encoding, but some idiotic software doesn't like this.

Also required for idiotic software. Technically, ID3v2 only supports one 8-bit encoding as of v2.3, and that is ISO-8859-1. Most software will shove ANSI text in there instead, and expect similarly marked tags to be ANSI encoded.

Software such as iTunes avoids this problem altogether by not reading ISO-8859-1 encoded tags at all.


This option is unnecessary, and in 0.9, a bad idea. I only added it because somebody was whining about their files being padded to an even multiple of 4096 bytes. Although it is debatable whether padding to file size is better than padding to tag size, padding the tags should not be regarded as a negative feature, especially if the tag is at the beginning of the file, where padding will aid fast retagging.

The defaults should be sufficient for all intents and purposes, and the only option you should ever need to change would be for disabling Unicode writing.

EDIT: Blah, corrected padding size.

So all I need is this setting, and I'm good to go for unicode in my id3v2 tags?

Always write ISO-8859-1: off
Write byte order mark (BOM) in all strings: on
Decode and write ISO-8859-1 tags system codepage (non-standard): off
Write tags without padding: off

I don't want to retag 7k+ mp3s and find out that it's the wrong settings.

i dont know if you want it,
but id3v1 + APEv2 will solve all your problems
you will be able to see everything right in 0.8.3, 0.9, and in your Iriver.

iRiver reads APEv2 or is it going to read id3v1?

Oh man...I was gonna check what was the default id3v2 plugin by clicking on the "reset all" button. That was a very stupid move. It reset it everything to the original, unmodified state. I though everything is saved on my .fcs file. Good thing I can restore it via system restore. That gave me a good scare.

Now I need to re-install Guild Wars again, as I just installed it a few hours ago.