Why was the character set override option removed?

[Jeff Mitchell]

On Wednesday 24 January 2007 08:35, Hans Ecke wrote:
> So you are between a rock and a hard place here. The tag recoding gets
> you confusion but taglib (and pretty much every other ID3 tool) is
> obviously not ready for v2.4 tags. I'm sorry.

I think what you mean is that TagLib is *only* ready for v2.4, and nothing 
else is :-)  Your crash with TagLib is a bug, but in general it implements 
v2.4 well.

> Moving on, what do you recommend for me?

Mark suggested EasyTag.  Keep in mind that this will write v2.3 tags, which 
may or may not work properly with international characters with other apps.  
Also, if you ever change a tag in Amarok it'll go back to v2.4.

I'd recommend eyeD3.  It's command-line but very powerful.

> Bringing it back
> would only have to be for a limited time (2 years or so) till the ID3
> tools and libraries have bugfree support for v2.4.

v2.4's been out for ages -- since 2000.  Quoted from http://www.id3.org:

"While there are legacy and future standards for ID3 tags, the most popular 
version implemented today is ID3  version 2.3. A followon version,  2.4, is 
documented on this website but has not achieved popular status due to some 
disagreements on some of the revisions and the tremendous inertia present in 
the software and hardware marketplace."

The real reason that makers have so much inertia is that implementing modern 
Unicode support is difficult, and tag library authors don't want to bother.    
ID3v2.3 specifies Unicode strings in UTF-16 format.  UTF-8 support, which 
emerged the clear Unicode winner, was not added until ID3v2.4.  AFAIK even 
many ID3v2.3 applications and libraries won't actually deal with ID3v2.3 tags 
with Unicode.

So when you're writing a media application, it puts you in a bit of a bind, so 
far as international character support goes.  Support the old standard using 
UTF-16 that other apps may not support, or support the new standard using 
UTF-8 that the other apps may not support.  :-)

--Jeff

>
> Please help!
>
> Thank you
>
> Hans
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