Cai Feng’s Blog

It’s a long time pain for my mp3 files. I tried a lot of kinds way to convert my mp3 files’ id3 tag encoding. But every time when I need to convert the tag, I can’t remembered what I did last time. Now I’m going to record some way to do this.

I used amarok. Since the developers os amarok hate to deal with various kinds of encoding, they determined to use unicode which required id3v2.4 tag. This decision makes a lot of Chinese music displayed like a mess in the amarok because most of Chinese music used old version, different encode id3 tags.

I found some good ways to convert your music id3 tags here: http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Converting_MP3_Tags_To_UTF-8

The most way I like is mid3iconv

I used it like this:

For a single file

$mid3iconv -e gb2312 a.mp3 --remove-v1 -dp

For a directory

$find . -name "*.mp3" -exec mid3iconv -e gb2312 --remove-v1 -dp "{}" \;

-p option means dry-run, so if you really want to convert, remove this option.

Linux id3, Linux, tool