Hi,
how can i prevent this flower ✿ from messing up other parts of the same tag? This problem is only occuring on my Android phone (A54 5G). I tried a smiley instead of the flower, but that ended up in a line of question marks for the entire title. The umlauts Ä Ö Ü ä ö ü and ß can be displayed correctly but not with the flower in the same tag.
For some reason it only happens if it's a .mp3-file (red lines). When it's a flac-file the title gets displayed correctly (green lines).
What are the settings for MP3tag tags in the options?
Ctrl-O >Tags>Mpeg > Id3V2-UTF16
should be the setting.
If it already is, press Ctrl-S to save the tags again.
The screeshot from the android device looks like it shows the filename - and not the tag data. What does the filename look like in the windows environment?
first, the bright white texts are the filename (with gray file-extensions). Below that in gray are the Tags:
Artist - Album - Year - Genre
Track. Title
Second,
The Filenames show up perfectly fine in windows.
This happens only on android and only with mp3-files for some reason.
If you try another player software (just for a test) on your Android phone, do you see the correct/expected characters?
(This would help to narrow down the source of the problem: Android as operating system or playing software.)
Or do we see the above screenshot from a file explorer software on your Android phone?
If MP3tag shows the tag data OK - but the player does not like it, there is not a lot that MP3tag can do.
A different andoid player would be worth a try.
it shows up like that in my file explorer with wich i transfered the file first and my music player app. so it´s more likely an android or samsung thing, i think.
The first image is from my phone, yes. It also shows up like that in my Musicplayer app "Musicolet". Everything gets displayed correctly in windows.
AFAIK Flac (Vorbis Comment) uses UTF-8 for character encoding.
Try out what happens if you save this mp3-file as ID3v2.4 UTF-8 in Mp3Tag.
That worked!
But why? Isn't UTF-8 worse than -16?
Bigger number doesn’t mean better. UTF-8 uses ASCII as a «base» and uses control characters for the additional symbols. The 8 only tells you that it uses 8 bit per character (and combines characters for non-ascii), and 16 means 16 bit per character. UTF-16 uses more space for «Latin» letters, and it also depends on endianess (so there are two versions of it).
so technological terms a as coherent as ever and i forgot that. perfect.
well, thanks for the clarification.
What is worse is the player's ignorance to standard compliant character encoding of the tag fields.
I would look for a different player rathern then resave my whole collection with ID3V2.4 tags.
I really don't think it an issue with the player and more with android. I mean two completely unrelated apps showed the same issue. And the player is so far the best i ever had. For example it has built in (sync)lyric display and editor. This is the first problem i ever had with it.
Also i won't redo all my songs in -8. That would take me days. If i have problems in the future with it, i will change it on a "per-case-basis".
You mean ID3v2 UTF-8?
Although ID3v2.4 has existed as a standard variant for more than 20 years, it hasn't yet widely prevailed over ID3v2.3, probably because it's difficult to replace a de facto standard with a new variant. Therefore, many people still use ID3v2.3 to be on the safe side in terms of compatibility.
In Mp3Tag, you can only get UTF-8 as the character encoding for MP3s if you select ID3v2.4.
However, as you write, saving all MP3s in this format with Mp3tag wouldn't really be a special effort. Instead of days, it would probably take a few minutes at most, depending on the number of files:
Change in Options -> Tags -> MPEG -> Write to ID3v2.4 UTF-8
Load all music files
Filter by the MP3 suffix
Select all displayed files with CTRL-a
Click Save
Android has no problem with UTF-16.
UTF-16 is used more frequently in Android than UTF-8.
I had been struggling with Android encoding issues with MP3 as well. I tried different encodings and switching between ID3 v2.3 and v2.4. It sometimes worked with some files, then other files with accents or umlauts broke again for no good reason.
I never figured out exactly what is happening, but it looks like Android is often doing some guesswork on the encoding, and sometimes getting it wrong. Which is a bit strange, because ID3 tags define the encoding quite clearly.
One solution is to use a player that does extract the tags itself instead of relying on the Android media library.
I personally got sick of dealing with the issue and switched to use Ogg Opus for all my files.
