# Fixing broken unicode characters
**URL:** https://community.mp3tag.de/t/fixing-broken-unicode-characters/4237
**Category:** Support
**Created:** [December 26, 2006, 12:28am UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/fixing-broken-unicode-characters/4237 "2006-12-26T00:28:44Z")
**Posts on this page:** 11
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@djkym](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/djkym)
#### Post date: [December 26, 2006, 12:28am UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/fixing-broken-unicode-characters/4237/1 "2006-12-26T00:28:44Z")
I have some asian songs from my cousin, and all the filenames as well as tags have broken unicode characters (ie. ¡²¢Ü¡³¸Õµ¥ÀÌ Å°Á.mp3 for a filename). I was wondering if there's an option within mp3tag that can fix these characters or if there's a separate program i can use.
btw, mp3tag is the best tag program i've seen so far, keep up the good work!
thanks,
dk
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### Author:  [@Sebastian\_Mares](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/Sebastian_Mares)
#### Post date: [December 26, 2006, 7:50am UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/fixing-broken-unicode-characters/4237/2 "2006-12-26T07:50:03Z")
I don't know any tool that can fix that. Those weird characters, are they always pairs? If yes, unicode characters have two bytes and maybe the program used for generating file names splitted those two bytes and mapped each byte to a character. It should be easy to fix if that's the case I guess.
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### Author:  [@dano](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/dano)
#### Post date: [December 26, 2006, 8:45am UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/fixing-broken-unicode-characters/4237/3 "2006-12-26T08:45:04Z")
You can try the action "Convert codepage".
Do any chinese characters show correctly on your system?
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### Author:  [@Noxx](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/Noxx)
#### Post date: [December 26, 2006, 4:22pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/fixing-broken-unicode-characters/4237/4 "2006-12-26T16:22:55Z")
same problem here, with japanese characters (asian are fonts installed).
[http://img294.imageshack.us/img294/9576/01zv4.png](http://img294.imageshack.us/img294/9576/01zv4.png)
screenshot 1 -\> mp3tag
☹
and what unicode should i use, utf-8 or utf-16?
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### Author:  [@Sebastian\_Mares](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/Sebastian_Mares)
#### Post date: [December 26, 2006, 4:46pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/fixing-broken-unicode-characters/4237/5 "2006-12-26T16:46:07Z")
The action type _has_ to be there. 😉
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### Author:  [@dano](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/dano)
#### Post date: [December 26, 2006, 7:31pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/fixing-broken-unicode-characters/4237/6 "2006-12-26T19:31:09Z")
Before you mess with the action, check if you have installed "files for East Asian language"
Just putting some fonts in the windows font dir is not enough.
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### Author:  [@Noxx](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/Noxx)
#### Post date: [December 26, 2006, 10:30pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/fixing-broken-unicode-characters/4237/7 "2006-12-26T22:30:43Z")
> [@dano](#):
>
> Before you mess with the action, check if you have installed "files for East Asian language"
> Just putting some fonts in the windows font dir is not enough.
230 mb is a lot of data ... i'll try it later.
@sebastian
aah ok, i found it. it's the ''action (quick)"-button and not the ''action''-button. but there's no japanese.
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### Author:  [@Sebastian\_Mares](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/Sebastian_Mares)
#### Post date: [December 26, 2006, 10:54pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/fixing-broken-unicode-characters/4237/8 "2006-12-26T22:54:52Z")
It has to be in both quick action and "regular" action actually since both use the same resources I guess (only that quick actions aren't saved).
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### Author:  [@dano](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/dano)
#### Post date: [December 26, 2006, 10:58pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/fixing-broken-unicode-characters/4237/9 "2006-12-26T22:58:10Z")
> [@](#):
>
> but there's no japanese.
That's because you have no japanese codepage installed in windows. It comes with "East Asian language".
But you can check the Advanced tab in the region settings, there are the codepages listed. Maybe you can only install the japanese one.
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### Author:  [@djkym](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/djkym)
#### Post date: [December 29, 2006, 4:02am UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/fixing-broken-unicode-characters/4237/10 "2006-12-29T04:02:04Z")
figured it out!
not only do u need the asian windows pack (as mentioned above), but if you happen to do streamripping from shoutcast, it doesn't properly support unicode (or at least the site i'm getting my songs from), so they appear funny. you can fix it using creative's media toolbox and select tag format converter. this will fix it all up! then use mp3tag to rename the filenames, based on the correctly formated tags.
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### Author:  [@system](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/system)
#### Post date: [February 9, 2026, 12:20pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/fixing-broken-unicode-characters/4237/11 "2026-02-09T12:20:03Z")