[ID3 Dev] curious problem with Cyrillic letters

Jim jmartin_92 at verizon.net
Sat Dec 22 19:02:24 PST 2007


Hi Sergei.

I don't think I deserve much thanks since it was just a guess, but I'm 
glad to hear you got it working.  As I side note, you might also want to 
convert any v2.2 tags you find to v2.3.  v2.3 is the version most 
commonly supported by both applications and devices (as far as I know).

Jim


Sergei Gerasenko wrote:
> Hi Jim,
> 
> You were absolutely right. I found a nice program to convert tags from
> one version to another. It's called eyeD3. And I watched the
> transformation from question marks to the correct Cyrillic letters
> before my very eyes. I just had to lower the version from 2.4 to 2.3.
> 
> Jim, I can't thank you enough.
> 
> Best regards,
> Sergei
> 
> On Sat, Dec 22, 2007 at 12:49:09PM -0500, Jim wrote:
>> Hi Sergei.
>>
>> This is just a guess but perhaps the problem is with how your MP3 player 
>> handles v2.4 tags?  (I haven't actually checked out your tags yet but 
>> they look ok at first glance.  The difference in TPE1 frame length is 
>> because the Linux tag includes the final "00 00" and the Windows tag 
>> doesn't, but I don't think that should cause the problem you are 
>> having.)  Does the Linux utility you are using give you any control over 
>> what version of tags are written?  If it does, maybe you can try setting 
>> it to write v2.3 tags instead of v2.4 and see if that fixes the problem?
>>
>> Jim
>>
>>
>> Sergei Gerasenko wrote:
>>> Hi everybody,
>>>
>>> I just bought a Sony NWZ-A818 MP3 player and I have quite a music 
>>> collection with cyrillic mp3 tags. After I transferred the collection to
>>> the player, it displayed everything that was Cyrillic with question marks. 
>>> So, I thought, bummer, the thing doesn't understand
>>> Unicode. But as I was scrolling through the list, to my surprise I found a 
>>> couple that were displayed correctly! I was very excited and
>>> became determined to find out what was different in those files that the 
>>> player displayed correctly.
>>>
>>> I soon discovered that if I created a Cyrillic tag on Windows XP (using 
>>> windows explorer), the player displayed the cyrillic
>>> characters correctly.  If I took the same song and read the tag on Linux, 
>>> the tag was also displayed correctly BUT if I edited and
>>> saved it on Linux (using Quod Libet, which uses a Python id3 library), the 
>>> tag turned into question marks both on Windows and
>>> the player.
>>>
>>> So I reduced the tag to as little as possible to find the difference. I 
>>> just left the artist name and made it 3 letters long "Vоп". Then I
>>> used a hex editor to read the tag. The only difference I saw was that 
>>> Windows made the tag version to be 2.3, while the
>>> Linux made it 2.4. 
>>>
>>> Also, Windows made the length of the artist name frame (TPE1) "09" and the 
>>> Linux version made it 2 bytes longer "0b". Otherwise they are
>>> completely identical. Except also for a difference in the size of the 
>>> whole tag: "1f76" and "0800" respectively.
>>>
>>> Here are the corresponding hex dumps:
>>>
>>> After editing on Windows
>>> ========================
>>>
>>> sergei at ubuntu:~$ hexdump -Cn 200 song.mp3
>>> 00000000  49 44 33 03 00 00 00 00  1f 76 54 50 45 31 00 00  
>>> |ID3......vTPE1..|
>>> 00000010  00 09 00 00 01 ff fe 56  00 3e 04 3f 04 00 00 00  
>>> |.......V.>.?....|
>>> 00000020  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  
>>> |................|
>>> *
>>>
>>>
>>> After editing on Linux
>>> =======================
>>> sergei at ubuntu:~$ hexdump -Cn 200 song.mp3 
>>> 00000000  49 44 33 04 00 00 00 00  08 00 54 50 45 31 00 00  
>>> |ID3.......TPE1..|
>>> 00000010  00 0b 00 00 01 ff fe 56  00 3e 04 3f 04 00 00 00  
>>> |.......V.>.?....|
>>> 00000020  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  
>>> |................|
>>> *
>>>
>>> This is where my expertise stops! Can someone figure out what's going on 
>>> here?
>>>
>>> If anybody is interested, both files can be found below but my download 
>>> speed is pretty bad. So please be patient.
>>>
>>> http://65.27.155.246/~sergei/windows_version.mp3 and
>>> http://65.27.155.246/~sergei/linux_version.mp3
>>>
>>> Looking forward to your analysis!
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>    Sergei
>>>
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