[SOLVED] Unreadable id3 tags, unknown encoding

Question

I have a some Japanese songs whose id3 tags are unreadable in easytag, id3info and mpd. They all say the tags are a bunch of question marks, but English text (including & and such) is displayed.
Of all the apps I found in the repos, mutagen was the most likely candidate to convert it with mid3iconv, with the -p and -d switches so it reports back and doesn't alter it (many apps will happily overwrite wrong data), and the -e switch with various encodings to try it out.
I tried the following, which will show the tags decoded from all the encodings that exist with iconv. It was the most thorough method I could think of.
for ENCODING in $(iconv --list | sed 's/..$//'); do
echo -----
echo $ENCODING
mid3iconv -p -d -e $ENCODING track\ 03.mp3
read
done
1167 times pressing enter later, none were correct!
~95% was question marks.
Sometimes the tags were blank and text that was English became garbled.
With some UTF-16 encodings a bunch of the same (wrong) Kanji appeared in only 1 field.
Does anyone have a good idea what I can try now?
I have uploaded an example file, so you can try out converting it, but I'm not sure if it's allowed to be posted on the forums.
I'll try foobar2000 in wine tomorrow.
Last resort is finding all the album info online and updating all the tags manually (not really looking forward to that though, since it's 900 mp3s).
Last edited by Procyon (2009-02-23 17:31:21)

Answer 1

Exactly the same problem it seems.
I found out that BIG5 has extensions.
HKSCS (Hong Kong Cantonese) is the wrong extension, because 昞 is the wrong character.
What I need is an extension that includes Japanese-only characters (like 様). So the one Firefox uses.
Well, in the mean time I solved the problem by dumping all the id3tags to one text file, using Firefox to convert it, and making one large id3tag script (went pretty fast in vim).
But for the future it would be great to have easytag use more BIG5 extensions.
EDIT:
It seems we did some similar research in the mean time.
The problem I mentioned above was about the iconv illegal character thing.
EDIT:
I am marking the thread as solved. A workaround seems to be the only way. It is impossible to get easytag to work this way. You can't manually add encodings, and glibc-devs seem to see this as very low priority.
Last edited by Procyon (2009-02-23 17:31:10)