Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[joe_marx]

Hi,
can anybody help:
I am using MC 12 with an english OS (MS Vista). The problem: MC can't read the chinese Song information (Artist, Albu etc). I tried it with a local libary on a chinese OS and it worked. Then I tried the chinese comp. connected via Libary server to the english OS computer and it did not work again.
As I don't want to loose all my Libary information when sepereating english songs to english OS and Chinese songs o Chinese OS isn't there a possibility to read the chinese inforamtion on the english OS computer? In case taht's possible I would of course be thrilled to know how ;-) and also send the chinese songs to the iPod so that the chinese caracters are possible to be read?
My problem is that I don't want to use Chinese OS as I can't read Chinese but my wife want's to be able to read her own songinformation in Chinese!
Thanks guys.
Cheers
Joe

[JimH]

You may just need the fonts installed.  Try using IE to visit some Chinese web sites.

[joe_marx]

IE works just fine with chinese fonts!?

[JimH]

Yes.  If you have them installed, when you visit a web page that uses them, it's automatic.  If you don't have them installed, installation of the fonts should be offered.

[joe_marx]

Thanks for the really fast reply!!! Yes, I know, that's what I ment: Chinese works on my IE as the fonts are already installed! But in MC I can't read Chinese?

[Yaobing]

Probably this is because the original tags are saved as ANSI text with Chinese encoding (Guo Biao, or Big5). MC uses Unicode text.

I have seen quite some tag text that do not display correctly in MC. I wish there is a way for MC to automatically detect the encoding of the text in tags. Matt?

Here is what I had to do to recover text that is in a tag but can not be displayed properly:

Copy the text in the tag in MC. Paste it in Notepad. It looks like this 谢谢你 新歌+精选. Save the txt file (in ANSI, not unicode). Open the txt file in a web browser. Initially it is still displayed incorrectly. View -> Character Encoding -> Chinese Simplified (GB2312). Now it is displayed 谢谢你 新歌+精选. Copy the text and paste it back to MC. Now MC saves the tag in Unicode.

You see, this is quite difficult if you have a lot of such tags to fix. Besides, it would not be reversible.

The flip side of this is that some handheld devices do not display Chinese text in Unicode. It would display ANSI text happily. I have a crappy mp3 player that does this. After fixing the tags in MC as I described above, I only get Question Marks displayed in the mp3 player.

[joe_marx]

thanks! I will try this eventhough like you said I have quiet some songs with this problem ;-) But that way I can check if it's a problem of the encoding.
Could the problem occur from ripping ( I use "audiograbber")?
Re portable, I use an iPod which should be OK then?
cheers

[joe_marx]

It worked  but I can't do this for 500 songs with each name, Artist and Album : I'll die! 
I could ripp all the CD's again using MC, but the YADB couldn't find most of the CD Information (Tags), where as with the freedb of Audiograbber I get most of them. I really think it could be a user error  as MC 12 is great and so far it worked better than any other program of its kind !??
I tried the sync with iPod and that works as well with ANSI! So the only problem now is how to change all the tags into ANSI!?

[Yaobing]

I tried the sync with iPod and that works as well with ANSI! So the only problem now is how to change all the tags into ANSI!?

Does iPod take MC's Unicode tags?

[joe_marx]

The iPod shows the same than in MC: meaning chinese in unicode looks the same as in MC and it's not readable, like what you wrote:  谢谢你 新歌+精选. Where as ANSI works on both: MC and IPod. but I need to proceed as decribed by you. What I did not check is what happens if I do everything as proposed by you but instead of safing it in ANSI format safe it in unicode and then open the file with IE... But just now I can't check as I am at work and MC runs at home ;-)
Cheers

[Yaobing]

The iPod shows the same than in MC: meaning chinese in unicode looks the same as in MC and it's not readable, like what you wrote:  谢谢你 新歌+精选. Where as ANSI works on both: MC and IPod. but I need to proceed as decribed by you. What I did not check is what happens if I do everything as proposed by you but instead of safing it in ANSI format safe it in unicode and then open the file with IE... But just now I can't check as I am at work and MC runs at home ;-)
Cheers

You might have Unicode and ANSI mixed up here. MC displays UNICODE tag, not ANSI tag. If iPod displays the same as MC does, then it displays Unicode too. That is good, at least iPod and MC are in agreement. My mp3 player does not display UNICODE. That puts me in a bad situation. If I want to see tags in MC, I can not see them in the player.

[GHammer]

It worked  but I can't do this for 500 songs with each name, Artist and Album : I'll die! 

For a one-off situation like this, try Mp3tag on one or two.
Under Mp3tag Options, look at Tags, then at Mpeg
Leave the options at default except click ID3v2.4 UTF-8
After you have it set, just load one or two files, then click Save
Mp3tag will simply rewrite your tags using UTF-8

May not work if they are actually ANSI.
In that case, you could try Mp3tag's freedb lookup.

I had the same experience and didn't find any simple way to correct it.

[Matt]

Media Center saves ID3v2 tags using UTF-8 or UTF-16 if there are extended characters (>127).  Other tag formats MC supports like APEv2 tags, etc. always support Unicode.

The only issue is when MC sees an ID3v2 tag flagged as "ANSI", we'll do the ANSI->Unicode conversion using the system's current codepage.  I'm not sure what else we could do.

You could switch your system codepage and then do "Update From Tags" on the files in MC.

Then save the tags with MC or any other program that deals with Unicode properly.

[tgack]

I had a similar problem with some of my collection that was tagged from freedb and similar sights.  I found Unicode Rewriter to be a big help even though the GUI was a little buggy. http://sourceforge.net/projects/unicoderewriter/

[joe_marx]

I had a similar problem with some of my collection that was tagged from freedb and similar sights.  I found Unicode Rewriter to be a big help even though the GUI was a little buggy. http://sourceforge.net/projects/unicoderewriter/

cool thanks, I'll try!

[joe_marx]

cool thanks, I'll try!

didn't work. On MS vista the java applet coldn't even be installed. On XP it worked but I could not choose teh format as teh big scrren permanently covered the choices and I could only choose between default and chinese traditional and some others like BIG5: then it only showed "files converted" with the standard format Cp1252. But looking at the result in the explorer (it will overwrite the ole ones, right?): no change at all. So after quiet a while I gave up