iTunes corrupts ID3v2 tags in mp3

First - I couldn't find any form for a bug report on this site, so I'm using this forum. If it is wrong please feel free to redirect me to correct place.
Well, the story is the following: I've tried to add a directory with it's subdirectories containing mp3's to playlist, but iTunes found only 30% of all files! Okay, I have the winamp's .m3u list of the same directory and iTunes can import it(at least there's such menu item). After I've opened m3u in iTunes it showed all the songs with national(Russian) letters in their name as <-)-< e.g. it doesn't understand this characters(winamp's m3u list is stored in plaintext, not in the unicode). After I've tried to play some of these mp3's their names displayed right. Great, I've started to play all these mp3's with "bad" names to correct them. I've uploaded them to iPod and was happy. Till I've launched winamp again. It showed all the songs names as giberish! And notice, only song names, artist name and album remained the same. I've found that iTunes replaced all the names in ID3v2 tags with their unicode variant! Why??? I really don't understand this. And I didn't found any checkbox like "don't corrupt my id3 tags".
What I need now is to return my tags to their previos state. I think that iTunes developers should 1)fix this bug 2)write an utility to restore the tags (it is their fault that the tags were corrupted).
Thanks for reading.
Waiting for response from developers.

--ss

Posted on Nov 2, 2005 6:10 AM

Reply
6 replies

Nov 2, 2005 8:06 AM in response to Sergey Sudnitsyn

The place to report a problem is here:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/feedback/

These forums are only other users.

You might want to clarify this point when you submit it there:

winamp's m3u list is stored in plaintext, not in the unicode


This does not make sense as it is, because plaintext is not an encoding and unicode is normally plain text. Do you mean koi8-r or windows 1251?

Personally I don't think your expectation is realistic. You should have kept a backup copy of your mp3's if you needed their tags preserved in some legacy encoding. OS X, iTunes, iPod all require Unicode.

Nov 2, 2005 9:03 AM in response to Tom Gewecke

I should have been said that I'm using iTunes for windows.
And this link http://www.apple.com/feedback/itunes.html leads to the "Request Music" page.
I know that "plaintext" is not an encoding(the real encoding of my m3u is win1251), I've just tried to say that winamp's playlist is not in unicode.
Okay, unicode is great. But why it converted only song's title, but not artist or album name?
I still would like to hear answers to my questions:
1. why iTunes skipped a lot of mp3's when I've tried to add a whole directory with it's subdirectories?
2. why it converts only song's name and not the reset?
3. will they publish some utility to recover id3 tags? (it is not hard to write such a programm)

Nov 2, 2005 9:18 AM in response to Sergey Sudnitsyn

why it converted only song's title, but not artist or album name?


You may need to use some iTunes functions or another program to do this. See if this FAQ helps:

Tom Gewecke, "Fixing Language Problems in iTunes/iPod", 04:49pm Dec 5, 2004 CDT

will they publish some utility to recover id3 tags?


I am sure Apple will not. Perhaps you can find a 3rd party program to do this.

Jan 27, 2006 1:42 PM in response to Sergey Sudnitsyn

Me too....

I have moved from the PC world to Mac, G5 with Tiger, and after importing all my iTunes albums over, Many many MANY self typed Russian Titles, artist and album names, over a LONG long period of time, and many hours of typing....

I get Complete Jibberish for them Now...

If I click and play, I see the right Name and Song, but Not in
the iTunes window...


Please can someone offer any more than above.....

Oh, A restore from the originals has the same effect....
Oh and the PC is now Long gone....

Someone will say it is the Backup software's fault right ?


G5, Powerbook G4 Mac OS X (10.4.2)

Jan 27, 2006 1:45 PM in response to Yorkie

ID3v2 tags only actually support 2 encodings: ISO-8859-1 and UTF-16. If you're using some other encoding, then your tags are wrong, and iTunes will probably mess them up in trying to "correct" them.

If you don't want this to happen, use a quality tag editor (like Tag&Rename) to switch all your tags to Unicode (UTF-16).

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iTunes corrupts ID3v2 tags in mp3

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