id3 tag problems

[Myriam Schweingruber]

Hi all,

since quite some time we get reports about id3 tag reading problems,
which seem to have not changed much in all the time we try to solve
that problem.

Here are a few links to the various bug reports about that problem, as
well as some forum posts with maybe some insight for the tag
specialists amongst us. I skipped the forum posts in other languages
than English, but there are other in both German and French, and I
guess also in Chinese, Peter can certainly confirm:

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=200596  this one is marked to
have a patch since ages, BTW...

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=207683

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=215467

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=216956

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=217228

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=217237 related to this forum
post: http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=116&t=83916&start=0

http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=116&t=84332&start=0 apparently
id3v1 tags are not read anymore, regression in 2.2.1?

They guy who reported bug 217237 sent me some files with Greek
characters that are not read correctly, I tested those, all tags are
read correctly with kid3, easytag, picard and VLC, it's just Amarok
that can't read some of those:

http://myriam.kollide.net/05-na_magapas-elli_paspala-sto_megaro_mousikis.mp3
 displays everything correctly

http://myriam.kollide.net/06-maroko-elli_paspala-sto_megaro_mousikis.mp3
 see for yourself

http://myriam.kollide.net/11-meglio_stasera-elli_paspala-sto_megaro_mousikis.mp3
 this one has the song title in Latin characters which is intended,
since it is sung in Italian, the Greek characters don't display at all
in Amarok.

I am just wondering why we seem to make the only application that is
not able to read id3 tags correctly. I tried those 3 files outside of
the collection, in the collection, scanned with and without encoding
detector which mad absolutely no difference, I end up with two of the
three files not displaying the tags correctly. Those are clearly
tagged in utf-8.

Yesterday somebody reported equally strange behavior with Russian
characters, where only Amarok was not able to display the artist tag
while displaying all other tags correctly:

http://myriam.kollide.net/artist_encoding.png

Since there are other players that can do it and that are also Free
Software, did anybody ever bother to check how they are doing it?
Apparently we are doing something wrong here, and nobody is able to
sort it out, so why not get a hint from other projects?


Regards, Myriam
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