For those of you who do not listen to music from other countries, this article may not have much meaning or relevance. But for those of you who do listen to international MP3 files from countries with character sets outside of standard ASCII like Japan, Korea and China, you have probably dealt with ID3 tags that display mojibake in your music player or operating system. Basically, instead of seeing the song name and artist in the appropriate language (even with the correct fonts installed), you see gibberish.

The cause of the problem is that the ID3 data in your mp3 file is using one character encoding while your operating system or music player is using another. For example, let's say I'm listening to a Korean mp3. The ID3 data may have been entered by a Korean native using a localized version of their operating system. Unless the user specifically used an international encoding scheme (such as Unicode), the data will be stored in a locale-specific encoding, in this case a Korean encoding. When the mp3 is played back on a western computer, it will most likely try to display the characters using ISO-8859-1 encoding (the most common western encoding), which of course is not the right encoding. As a result, the text shows up garbled and unrecognizable since it is neither Korean nor English.

Fortunately, this is not a difficult problem to fix. Here are the basic steps:

1) Select a target ID3 tag version and encoding

You should know beforehand what the target ID3 version and encoding will be for your mp3 files. If you just want ID3 data with foreign character sets to display properly, you should select ID3 version 2.3 with UTF-16 encoding or ID3 version 2.4 with UTF-8 encoding. ID3 version 2.4 is the latest standard but not all music players support it very well. For example, WMP (Windows Media Player) 11 on Windows XP doesn't display ID3 2.4 data with UTF-8 properly. Also, there are reports of UI bugs when iTunes uses ID3 2.4 with UTF-8. The safe choice is ID3 2.3 with UTF-16 encoding. UTF-8 was not included in the standard for 2.3, which is why it uses UTF-16. In my experience, this is the best combination as the data displays properly in all applications tested including WMP, iTunes and Rhythmbox.

2) Install/setup mp3tag

Mp3tag is a great little application that has the required functionality for fixing the aforementioned ID3 data. Be aware that Mp3tag is a native Windows app, so if you are looking for a *nix solution, you will need to run it via wine or look elsewhere. Easytag is a great ID3 tagging solution on Linux and I believe it has the required conversion functionality. But alas, I haven't tested it yet (I'll update this post when I have) and so I currently still recommend mp3tag.

Once mp3tag is installed, go to the preferences menu and set it up so that ID3 v2.3 with UTF-16 encoding is the default.

3) Open the broken mp3 files in mp3tag

Select all the songs that show mojibake (if the ID3 data shows correctly, do not select them). Right click on your selection and click on Convert -> Actions. Assuming this is your first time doing this, you will need to add a new action group. Call it 'Charset conversion' or something similar. Now you will need to add an action to this newly created group. You should be able to select the action 'Convert Codepage' from a list of available actions. Choose the source code page from the list. For example, if you are working with a Korean mp3, select the Korean codepage. Setup the conversion so that the action applies to the TAG data. Once the action group has been setup, execute the action by checking the box next to the action group and clicking OK. The data should have been converted and you should see Korean text instead of mojibake.

The information here assumes that you have the appropriate fonts installed to be able to view international character sets.

Once you have standardized on ID3 v2.3 with UTF-16 encoding, the ID3 data should display fine in your operating system and in your media players.