[ID3 Dev] Encoding UTF-16 (i.e UTF-16 with BOM which is the most compatible choice Little Endian or Big Endian ?)

Audio Ranger Development developer at audioranger.com
Thu Apr 28 03:27:59 PDT 2011


It shouldn't matter. Applications which can handle UTF-16 should be able 
to decode both UTF-16BE and UTF-16LE. If you're in doubt, you may simply 
test this with major music players in order to be sure.

Unsynchronization is a different problem, many applications don't 
support it. So don't use it, unless it's actually required. This however 
should only be the case if really old ID3 software or hardware is being 
used.

Mathias K.


Am 27.04.2011 20:36, schrieb Paul Taylor:
> I think you are missing my point Im NOT talking about the UTF-16BE
> encoding but the UTF-16 encoding (Which is UTF with BOM and can contain
> LE or BE data). I have no problem reading or writing the data but would
> like to know which is the most compatible choice. When embedded within
> an mp3 UTF-16 is not magically decoded by the operating system, it has
> to be decoded by the application, and Im sure there are some
> applications that can embed BOM LE but not BOM BE or vice versa. There
> is also the complication that the Byte order marks themselves in BOM LE
> requires unsynchronization if you are using unsynchronization whereas
> BOM BE does not, and applications such as Windows 7 Explorer itself
> don't understand unsynchronization making me think that BOM BE is more
> compatible.
>
> Paul

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