= 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 ==

[[http://easytag.sourceforge.net|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.
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