Which Tag format for my MP3's ??

[fliederb]

Hi all,
I'am new to Squeezebox Duett and have observed some mystic things as my SQ does not recognize several songs where the ID Tag is view-able ->(in Windows-explorer Ican see something like that when klicking Properties...and my Media Player tells me the same...but my SQ doesnt find it.)
I use MP3tag, so meanwhile I saw there are several tag-formats i can write...
In the help-file of MP3Tag there are also several hints...that UTF-8 /UTF-16 formats are not recognized by most/some MP3 players.
The default setting of the MP3Tag program is UTF-16...

Should I convert all my mp3's to the ISO 8859-1 (help sounds that this is most compatible) or UTF-8 or UTF-16 format ?

Where are the disadvantages ?
I want to use my songs on most platforms...

Cheers
fliederb

[DoomWolf]

UTF-16 will work fine in SC. That's what my MP3Tag is set to and I've never had any problems.

The only tag version you need to worry about is that it's set to ID3v2.

My MP3Tag has the following settings:

Read all tags
Write ID3v2.3 UTF-16 (deselect ID3v1 and APEv2)
Remove ID3v1 and APEv2

The best thing is to ensure that all your music only uses ID3v2 tags and to remove all other tag versions. I wrote a post on how to do that a while ago. See http://forums.slimdevices.com/showpo...8&postcount=14

[Moonbase]

+1 for what DoomWolf says.

ID3v2.3/UTF-16 is the best format if you have titles/albums/artists that have "foreign" (i.e., non-ASCII) characters.

ID3v2.3/ISO-8859-1 is the best choice if you really have to support mobile and car MP3 players, since those often still don’t understand UTF tags. This also holds true for older broadcasting software, like SAM Broadcaster.

Using Unicode characters in filenames is sometimes problematic with Windows software and MP3 players but usually works fine with SC (on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X).

In this case, you might want to decide keeping the extended characers in the tags but replacing them in the filenames renamed by Mp3tag. This can easily be done by using functions in Mp3tag while renaming. You could, for instance, use:

$validate($ansi(%artist% - %title%),_)

instead of just

%artist% - %title%

which would result in the following:

Original Title:
Alfred E. Moonbase - Test #10: Chinese (Zhōngwén) / 中文

Original filename (using Unicode):
Alfred E. Moonbase - Test #10_ Chinese (Zhōngwén) _ 中文.mp3

Renamed filename (using ISO only):
Alfred E. Moonbase - Test #10_ Chinese (Zhongwén) _ __.mp3