I recently discovered my cowon DAP (iAudio F2) displays ID3v2.4 information with UTF-8 encoding in Korean characters for some reason and as my luck would have it, it is how my entire music collection is tagged. Being that retagging my 21 gygs is a bit of a pain I would really like some more educated input on why I should or shouldn't use a specific text-encoding type.

id3v2.3 utf-16 DAP displays properly
id3v2.3 Latin 1 (iso-8859-1) DAP displays properly
id3v2.4 Latin 1 (iso-8859-1) DAP displays properly
id3v2.4 utf-16 no ID3 information displayed
id3v2.4 utf-8 characters displayed in korean or.. some other asian character

Due to the limitations of my player and preferred tagger I have the 3 ID3 types to chose from and am curious as to the practical differences in: id3v2.3 utf-16 // id3v2.3 Latin 1 (iso-8859-1) // id3v2.4 Latin 1 (iso-8859-1)

because I would like to not have to re-tag my music collection ever again.

ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1 will be the most compatible; it's pretty much the de facto standard.

double post

In general it's best to use ID3v2.3 tags due to its successor being rather unpopular on the industry's side, leading to a lack of proper support. Even the widespread Windows Media Player and iTunes software have their troubles displaying ID3v2.4 tags, hardware support is even more limited. At least 2 of my 3 hardware players don't read them at all, the third one is exclusively filled with Vorbis files and hence it wasn't ever tested with the MP3 codec. One of these two devices also fails at correctly displaying UTF-16 entries, it usually ends up with complete garbage instead. Since I only encode to MP3 for these two devices I finally chose the most compatible combination, ID3v2.3 in ISO 8859-1 character encryption, as default tagging format.

Ultimately it's up to your personal needs whether you wanna switch to the more compatible ID3v2.3 UTF-16 (UTF-8 doesn't exist for 2.3) or even ID3v2.3 ISO 8859-1 instead. If you don't have any real need for unicode the latter might be the better choice.


-ID3v2.3 ISO 8859-1: Clearly the most compatible but also the most restricted one.
-ID3v2.3 UTF-16: Less compatible but features support for unicode characters.
-ID3v2.4 ISO 8859-1: The least compatible one of your 3 choices, converting from your current ID3v2.4 UTF-8 to this format wouldn't make much of a practical difference. Your DAP displays it, but many other devices won't do so.

I began going through a very involved process of retagging all my files with Musicbrainz Picard (great program but right now there's some stability problems). I didn't know anything about text encoding and it's default was Id3v2.4 UTF-8. That caused a problem, information was showing up in some kind of Asian character. I wish I was more multilingual, but I cannot read any Asian languages. Maybe I was unclear before but any song showing up as Asian characters was completely unintended and I find it extremely hard to believe that any accurate translation was going on unbeknownst to me.

After some tests I discovered which versions of text encoding displayed properly and I was unable to find out anything definitive about the encoding types in some searching. I chose 2.3 UTF-16. UTF just sounded better to me like a simple yet elegant implementation. I didn't really know anythingg about text encoding. Mysteriously all the newly tagged files turned up in Asian characters again.

Turns out the culprit was foobar2000. When used to add Replaygain data it rewrites tags. I checked a "compatibility mode" box for tags. I have no idea what text encoding version it's using but I just know it works with my Portable DigitalAudioPlayer now.

Your information was very helpful, though, and I'll keep it in mind for the future!