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#56 Copying "tag 2" into "tag 1" broken
Trying to fix up some of the files here with incorrect ID3v1.1 (wrong Cyrillic encoding) tags by overwriting them with ID3v2.3.0, I get all question marks...
The first attachment shows the window-shot before any changes -- not the bogus characters in Title and Artist fields of Tag 1.
The second attachment shows the same window after I pressed the "From Tag 2" button on the right. Note, how -- instead of being properly copied from Tag 2, the fields turned into ?-marks.
The text is in Ukrainian and my own $LANG here is set to uk_UA.KOI8-U. Running Kid3-3.1.2 on FreeBSD. The problem is the same with both KDE4 and Qt4 builds of the program.
Discussion
Do you have the correct encoding set for ID3v1 tags? Regarding your message I assume that "Settings/Configure Kid3/Tags/Tag 1/ID3v1 Text encoding" must be set to "KOI8-U".
Not sure, if this is, what I need, but the text encoding for Tag 1 (ID3v1) is set to ISO-8851-1 (latin1).
Changing that to KOI8-U does improve things -- but should not the program be detecting this automatically -- and suggesting a solution?
WARNING: Some characters used in Tag 2 can not be represented using the encoding you've selected for Tag 1 (
%s). Would you like to change the encoding to one of: list of encodings that can fully represent the string being copied?Ticket moved from /p/kid3/bugs/104/
Detection of the 8-bit encoding is possible but it depends on the context. If the amount of text found in the ID3v1 tag is enough to reliably guess the encoding is questionable. If have experimented with an example text - all text editors and browsers I tested did not detect the encoding, but it was possible with chardet.
I do not think that Kid3 should encourage users to store text which is not ISO-8859-1 encoded in the ID3v1 tag. This is the informal standard, see for example the TagLib documentation. MP3 Diags will even complain if non-ASCII characters are found in the ID3v1 tag, so it is best to restrict the character encoding to ASCII.
The purpose of the ID3v1 text encoding option is to be able to transfer existing IDv1 tags in a non-ISO-8859-1 encoding to ID3v2 tags in Unicode, as it is described in the Kid3 handbook.
Automatic correct detection is seldom possible. However, in Kid3 3.2.0, you have a script which helps you to find the correct encoding, see in the file list context menu, "Text Encoding ID3v1".