Russian ID3 tag problems, a little help please?

[PlayWithFire]

Can someone please help me understand something.
I have a few russian songs. The file names are in english letters. But, the ID3 tags are in cyrilic. But, they dont' really show up as russian letters, but as some wierd charachters.

I don't really have a way to type in russian on my PC, so i use an extension for firefox to type, and then copy and paste russian text.

So, that's what i did.
I typed the band name in russian letters in Firefox, and added that into the tag.
I also renamed some files in windows, and they show up in windows explorer just fine.
But, take a look at the two images
First one, is a screenshot on the winamp playlist, second is a screenshot on MP3 tag.


As you can see winamp doesn't really like either version (the cyrilic that was with the file, or the one pasted from firefox). None of those are russian letters.

MP3Tag on the right, seems to be able to read the cyriclic pasted from firefox (all the in the direcotory that starts with 13) but the ones above are still giberish.

Why is that?

Is it a different encoding? I remember seeing stuff like KOI-8 and other encodings.

And where does unicode come into all this?

Oh, and this is an iRiver related post.

Here's how the iRiver behaves. The original ID3 tag, show up as giberish, but the ones that i pasted from Firefox, show up like i want them to. But, RockBox plain out refuses to show them. It just shows up blank.

I hope the post is not too confusing, and i am desparate for help here

Thanks!

[DreamTactix291]

Unicode is a different type of text encoding than your standard seperate language encodings. It has many advantages.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode

[PlayWithFire]

guess the subject is misleading
i just changed it

[sheva]

same problem man, guesse u just have to change all th etags all over againe, like i did!!!

[saab_rider]

Winamp by itself doesn't support Unicode, and is crappy for viewing non-latin text. So before you remove your tags or retype them, we need to figure out if your tags are in Unicode or not.
Are you using windows XP? If you are, follow these steps:

1. open the folder where the songs with cyrilic tags are in explorer
2. Change the view type to "Details" (Either from the "View" menu in the title bar, or by right clicking, then choosing from the view menu)
3. Go to the bar which says "Name, Type, Size, Date Modified", right click, and select "Title" and "artist".

This will display the ID3 tag info in explorer. If you can see the Cyrilic text after you did this, then your ID3 tags are most likely in Unicode, and they just won't show in Winamp (because it lacks Unicode support) If you use Foobar, or iTunes you won't have any problems viewing the tag info like you did in Winamp.

If you still can't see the text, then follow these steps :

1. Open Control Panel
2. If it says "Pick a Catagory", click "Switch to Classic View" from the left.
3. Open "Regional and Language Settings".
4. Go to the "Advanced" tab
5. From "Language for non-Unicode Programs", choose the type of Cyrilic that applies for you.
6. Click "Apply"
7. A pop-up window will show up, click "Yes" so you don't need to use the XP CD
8. It will ask you to restart, click "Yes"

Now open the folder which has the MP3s with Cyrilic tags. Look at the "Title" and "Artist" info which (look above for instructions on viewing ID3 tags in explorer). If it shows up properly, then the tags aren't in Unicode. You should be able to view the text in Winamp in this situation.

If you STILL can't view the text, then the tagging wasn't done properly, and the text is corrupted! Unicode tagging is usefull for people who use more than one non-latin language. If you only use Cyrilic, then the second method should be dequate for you. Go to the link in my tab (I'm starting to sound like Febs!) for more info about Unicode.

PS. I just saw the second image you posted!!! To answer your question, the songs with "13" are Unicode. They won't show in Winamp whatever you do. They will show fine in Foobar or iTunes. The files with "14" are non-unicode. If you try the second soloution I told you about and choose cyrilic in control panal, they should display correctly, and even in Winamp. Hope this helps.

[PlayWithFire]

i forgot about this topic, i've since then solved my problem

first of all, my tags were NOT unicode to start with. I used MP3Tag to make them unicode. there's a nice action there that does that automagically

as for winamp not displaying unicode, i solved that problem too.
i switched to musikcube, and i am pretty satisfied with it

i think there's a way to get winamp to dipslay cyrilic, by using applocale from microsoft. You should hit up the winamp forums for details.

i want to be one of the cool people and say that i use foobar, but i just can't get past the interface.

[sheva]

here man i got it working on h340 ave a look!!!

[PlayWithFire]

oh, i've had it working for a while


some of the MP3s that i, *cough*aquire*cough* , already have the tags in them. Most of the time, they will be in cyrilic encoding. Then MP3 tag does a very nice job converting them to unicode.
If they don't have any tags, or the tags are written in latin, i'll just go allofmp3.com and copy and paste the titles of the songs, as well as the artist and the album, and then do filename from tag

P.S. this is way of topic, but have you guys tried http://www.tinypic.com/
For some reason i prefer it to image shack, and photobucket. It makes all the image URLs very short. Here are the two URLs for the images above.
http://tinypic.com/js2c2c.gif
http://tinypic.com/js2d5g.gif
Nice, huh?

[sheva]

Well i do it the long way anyway, make the tags and names all over againe, in english, i ave about 200songs more to retag, but im too lazy to do it, so i just left it!! Oh if there ever was a program.....

P.S Very handy, ill start using it now!

[PlayWithFire]

there's a Russ Key extension for firefox that can "russify" the text

so, if you type in, someting like "privet" you hightlick the text, and click something and that will change it into "привет"

That may help you somewhat, but then again, maybe not

So, where are you from, and what type of music are you retagging?

P.S. glad to help