Mp3tag Does Not Read UTF-16 ID3v2 Tags

General Discussion
1

I like Mp3tag but have encountered one problem with it. It doesn't seem to read UTF-16 ID3v2 tags written by Foobar2000. I had to check the "Write ISO-8859-1 tags instead of UTF-16" option in Foobar2000 to get Mp3tag to read the tags. If Mp3tag doesn't have UTF-16 support it'd be nice if it were added since basically everything else supports it from what I've tried. And also I believe UTF-16 is in the ID3v2.3 specs so it should be supported by all software that supports ID3v2.3.

One more thing...

I also noticed that when I edit an M4A file with Mp3tag that it causes iTunes to display a slightly inaccurate bitrate. For example, for an M4A file of 128kbps edited by Mp3tag iTunes will display as 127kbps instead of 128kbps.

Just some things I've found in Mp3tag that I thought should be looked at. I posted this at HydrogenAudio but I didn't get any responses so I figured it couldn't hurt to post at Mp3tag's forums as well. Great program and keep up the good work!

2

Yes, that's right. Mp3tag doesn't support UTF-16 (Unicode) ID3v2 tags, because the tagging library which I'm using (id3lib) has still some serious issues regarding Unicode. If you don't need chinese or other special character support you're on the save side when using ISO-8859-1 tags.

iTunes always sets the bitrate property to 128000 bps, but the real value is 127490 bps instead. At the moment I'm re-calculating the bitrate MP4-property when updating the metadata. That's why the bitrate will show up as 127kbps after a metadata update.

Best regards,
~ Florian

3

Thanks for the quick reply. I've decided to use ISO-8859-1 tags rather than Unicode since I have no need for the extra characters offered by Unicode as I live in the United States and all the characters I'll ever need to use are in ISO-8859-1.