ID3iconv 0.2.1 review

ID3iconv is a little Java command line tool to convert ID3 tags in mp3 files from whatever machine encoding you have to Unicode

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 38K Developer: Feng Zhou

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ID3iconv is a little Java command line tool to convert ID3 tags in mp3 files from whatever machine encoding you have to Unicode. It convert both ID3v1 tags and ID3v2 tags to Unicode-encoded ID3v2 (v2.3 or v2.4). This is sometimes useful because:

ID3v1 or v2 don't really supports multi-byte encodings such as GBK or Big5. Most existing files falsely pretend they are ISO-8859-1 encoded. This means the softwares handle them in all kinds of weird ways.

Even if the user can force the encoding in some players, it is then impossible to display tags of several international languages at the same time if files are so encoded.

I wrote this to convert all my mp3 files with Chinese (both simplified and traditional Chinese) tags to Unicode and play them using Rhythmbox under Linux. This is after much struggle with XMMS and other players that either cannot handle the large charsets GBK/GB18030 or cannot handle Chinese at all.

CAUTION: The tool updates mp3 files in place. You have to do a backup if you don't want to lose your precious music.

What's New in This Release:
Bug fix: Under windows, cannot rename the output temp file to the original file name
Bug fix: Conversion from v2 tag is using different encoding (big-endian UTF-16) from conversion from v1. Now both using little-endian UTF-16 for better compatibility.
Added option to force using id3v1 tag even if v2 tag exists
Added option to remove v1 tag after convertion