[ID3 Dev] curious problem with Cyrillic letters

[Sergei Gerasenko]

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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> >
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