MP3 Tag Encoding Problem

If you found your MP3 tags (title, album, etc) are not well displayed in players or applications like Rhythmbox, which is especially true for Asian users, you may want to convert their tags to UTF-8 such that they should be properly displayed almost everywhere.

EasyTAG

EasyTag supports IDv2.4, which allows UTF-8, as of version 3.1.1. The first release of Ubuntu to include this is 7.10 (Gutsy). notice though that easytag doesn't support converting tags that already exist.

You can install easytag from the universe repository.

sudo apt-get install easytag

Using python-mutagen

Python-mutagen is a tool which can do mass conversion of mp3 files. Unfortunately the current version (1.0) in Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) does not support the mass converting function. Starting in Ubuntu 6.10 python-mutagen does support mass conversion.

Installing python-mutagen

You can install python-mutagen from the Universe Repository.

sudo apt-get install python-mutagen

Convert tags of MP3 files using python-mutagen

Go to the directory where you put your MP3 files, or go to the home directory, using the following command,

find . -iname "*.mp3" -execdir mid3iconv -e <encoding> {} \;

where <encoding> is the original encoding of the tags (e.g. "GBK" for simplified Chinese or "windows-1255" for hebrew). python-mutagen will then search for all .mp3 files in current directory (recursively) and convert their tags to proper form.