To Those Who Wish to Displaying Chinese Text on Your Ipod - My Experience

[nichihan]

Hi All,

This is a little story about how I managed to tranfer about 1,000 songs with Chinese tags into my ipod.

Just a disclaimer - I am by no means an expert in this. I merely found my methods through trial and error, with the help of Google. If you have better methods of displaying Chinese text in the ipod, please email me at nichihan@verizon.net . I would really appreciate it!

I recently bought a 40gb ipod and tranfered all of my songs from my computer to the ipod via itunes. After my initial tranfer, the Chinese text displayed as symbols on the display. It seems that neither itunes nor the ipod recognize the tags as being Chinese.

I then turned on NJStar and the Chinese characters were correctly displayed in itunes. Slight problem - the ipod does not run NJStar. And after a day of googling, I found out that the ipod cannot recognize Big5GB Chinese. It can, howeve, recognize Unicode. So herein lies my problem - none of my songs were in Unicode. I am currently running Windows 2000 and one way to tell whether the text is in Unicode is to see if the text comes up as coherent Chinese characters or garbled symbols. If the former is the case, then it is in Unicode.

I then spend a few more hours googling for automatic group-conversion methods to transfer from my current text format to Unicode. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find anything that I can use. I found sites that converted Chinese characters to Unicode in html -
http://weber.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/reso...codemaker.html

and a site with a Java program that I had no idea how to use -
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~zf/id3iconv/

Regardless, I was determined to solve this problem and decided to tackle it using the most primitive method - brute force (entering the text one by one). Now I have no clue as to how to use Window's Chinese input via keystrokes. But I do know pinyin, which was a pain in the ###. I also discovered that if you copied and pasted your text from NJStar Word Processor, they would be recognized as being Unicode (you can tell by hitting the backspace key after you enter your text in itunes - if it erases an entire word, then it's Unicode; if it erases only part of the word, then it's non-Unicode).

I needed to make sure that after I tag my songs in Chinese in itunes, it would not convert back to a non-Unicode format (I know this to be a real problem for me but I don't know what exactly is causing this. I was about to spend crazy hours on this - it would suck to move the files to another program and have them revert back again).

So I found that one of the tagging formats - namely id3v2.3 supports Unicode and that they SHOULD be able to retain my Unicode text. So anyway, I converted every one of my songs that required Chinese tagging to id3v2.3 format in itunes and started to input the text one by one.

I found that if you copied and pasted the original tag from the song into NJStar WP, it would automatically convert it to Unicode. All you need to do is paste it back into the tag from WP. Cha-Ching! Saved me at least 4 hours of work. I have since spent 8 man-hours doing this. All of my Chinese tags are in Unicode format now and they display correctly in both itunes (without the help of NJStar) and my ipod.

Now I can get started on my Japanese songs...

[nichihan]

Bump for those that had the same problem.

[SouthsideIrish]

Hmm...I guess I should be happy that I've done my tagging, first in xPlay, then in ephPod, and now in MC10 since I have never had any problems whatsover with my Chinese, Japanese and Korean tags.

BTW, the way I did it was to tag everything based on the file structure and file name, so as an example ???????? - ???????? - JPop - 2004/01 - ??????????.m4a, then I could use any program that supported unicode to tag.



Bill

[ggameboy]

Hi,

I have successfully used the java jar file which the original poster posted in here to convert the chinese songs tag. I'm very happy of it.

Here is the command line, you need to put it.

java -jar id3iconv-0.2.1.jar -e MS950 *.mp3


You need JRE to run the jar file. MS950 is the encoding set. This what the system use to encode the double bytes characters in iPod.

Please leave me any comments here. Thanks. Hope this help alot of people here having the problems with displaying chinese.

[ggameboy]

Hi,

I have successfully used the java jar file which the original poster posted in here to convert the chinese songs tag. I'm very happy of it.

Here is the command line, you need to put it.

java -jar id3iconv-0.2.1.jar -e MS950 *.mp3


You need JRE to run the jar file. MS950 is the encoding set. This what the system use to encode the double bytes characters in iPod.

Please leave me any comments here. Thanks. Hope this help alot of people here having the problems with displaying chinese.

[nichihan]

Hi

I'm such a newb. Where do I need to put the jav file to run it?

Thanks.

[ggameboy]

You need download the JDK from www.java.com

Then get the jar file where you found from the first post.

You need put the jar file in where is the mp3. or you specify the file in path.

[mhuie]

For Windows 2000/XP/2003. Go to Regional and Language options.

Under the languages tab, check Install files for East Asian Languages

Under the Advanced tab, change the Language for non-Unicode programs to 10002 (MAC - Traditional Chinese Big5)

Hit OK, then restart. Thats the way I've always done it. Play the song under iTunes, and it will automatically change to Chinese characters.

----

The Java program is a better way, but heres some hiccups you may run into.

1. Download the INTERNATIONAL version of the JRE, the english only version does not support the Extended Encoding Set

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/download.html

click DOWNLOAD for Windows, Accept the license then download then this file:

Windows (all languanges, including English) (j2re-1_3_1_11-windows-i586-i.exe, 7.89 MB).

2. Download the jar file from http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~zf/id3iconv/. Make sure you Right-click Save Target as.. or else you will have a .JAR.ZIP file. You want a .JAR file.

Then the commands from ggameboy's post will work
"java -jar id3iconv-0.2.1.jar -e MS950 *.mp3 "

HTH

[mcdull169]

I tried the method suggested by mhuie, but still I can't read chinese id3 tag in itunes and ipod mini. The OS I'm using is window 2000 Pro. w/SP4. Please give me some suggestion, thanks!!!

[etam]

new here.. still a little confused.. with java program, you change the tag of mp3 and it will display correctly BOTH in ipod and itune? or itune only?

thanks.

[etam]

getting this error..

[edit] ok.. it works now.. get java from here:
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/download.html

[goofrider]

I tried to use the Java program, but it (or more accurately, the JVM) seems to have trouble reading filenames and pathnames with Unicode.

How do I resolve this? If I were to rename all the MP3s to Latin characters manually then back, then I might as well convert the ID3 manually too.

For the record, the default enoding for Unicode filenames in Windows is UTF16 Little Endian, not UTF8, right?

[etam]

try to run from local directory.. no path to mp3 files

[goofrider]

Originally posted by etam
try to run from local directory.. no path to mp3 files

That's what I'm already doing. In fact, it's the only thing I can do. I haven't found a way to enter or display extended Unicode charsets in Win2K/XP's command prompt, which means I can only pass Unicode filenames to id3iconv by using wildcards.

So let me be clear. When I run ID3iconv from cmdline in Win2k/XP, it cannot read any files that have Unicode characters in their filenames and/or FQPNs. The arguements themselves did not contain Unicode (since CMD.EXE can neither display nor accept Unicode AFAIK).

[goofrider]

OK guys, I found a better converter anyways. It's called ConvertZ. And I believe it's freeware.

http://alf-li.tripod.com/c_convertz.html


it's a full-blown Win32 app with GUI, so none of the cmdline limitation. You can convert Big5 and GBK to Unicode, you can convert ID3 tags, filenames, HTML code, it even can convert Simplified Chinese Unicode to Traditional Chinese Unicode. The GUI is internationalized and support English Win2k/XP prefectly fine.


By using ConvertZ, I can stop using NJStar altogether and convert everything to Unicode. Which is great because NJStar Communicator is $99 while ConvertZ is free. NJStar has been crashing left and right on by XP box anyways (which is weird cuz it runs fine on my Win2K laptop).

This is probably what I've been looking for all along. Hope you'll find it useful too.