Print

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

[Ce.D]

Hello Guys,

I was wondering whether character encoding is part of the ID3vX specification AND if MC could in one way or the other handle meta-data using UTF-8 character encoding.

NB: all of my files are ripped and stored on a Linux box (so quicker file sharing ;-D ), which natively supports UTF-8 rather than ISO-whatever.

Thank you for your lights ;-)

[Ce.D]

Hello Guys,

I eventually answered my own question. So, for those of you evolving in a mixed Windows (Media Center) and Linux environment (I wish I'm not the only one ), here is what I came to:

1. Use AmaroK media player under Linux, which allows to deal with ID3 tags on the ISO-8859-1 encoding basis (look in the application settings)

2. Use a script to convert ID3 tags from UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1 when encoding. Follows an example for LAME :

#!/bin/sh

# Check command line
[ $# -lt 7 ] && echo "USAGE: $0 <src> <dst> <ta[artist]> <tl[albumtitle]> <ty[year]> <tt[title]> <tn[number]>" && exit

# Retrieve arguments
VERSION=`lame --version | head -n 1`
SRC=$1
DST=$2
TA=`echo $3 | iconv -f UTF-8 -t ISO-8859-1`
TL=`echo $4 | iconv -f UTF-8 -t ISO-8859-1`
TY=`echo $5 | iconv -f UTF-8 -t ISO-8859-1`
TT=`echo $6 | iconv -f UTF-8 -t ISO-8859-1`
TN=`echo $7 | iconv -f UTF-8 -t ISO-8859-1`

# Launch LAME
lame --preset extreme --tc "Encoded: ${VERSION} --preset extreme" --ta "${TA}" --tl "${TL}" --ty "${TY}" --tt "${TT}" --tn "${TN}" "${SRC}" "${DST}"

Hope this helps some of you out there