Sending Techie email to customer support

February 04, 2008

Here’s the copy of my email to Simplify Media hoping they can fix the issue with UTF-8 ID3v2 tags.

Hi,

First of all, thank you for the great software. I love using it to listen to my home library from work.

I’m using both Mac OSX Tiger and iTunes as a client and server, and Simplify Media seems to have issues publishing MP3 files with UTF-8 ID3v2 tags. (AAC files are fine). Look at this picture how my Japanese songs are listed broken: http://bulknews.tumblr.com/post/25270699

I made a couple of experiments with files that are incorrectly displayed and correctly displayed, and looked at how ID3 tags are encoded for each file. Apparently, Simplify Media seems to work with ID3v2 tags when the tag text is encoded in UTF-16, but breaks when it’s UTF-8.

From ID3v2 spec: http://www.id3.org/id3v2.4.0-structure

  Frames that allow different types of text encoding contains a text

  encoding description byte. Possible encodings:

    $00   ISO-8859-1 [ISO-8859-1]. Terminated with $00.     $01   UTF-16 [UTF-16] encoded Unicode [UNICODE] with BOM. All           strings in the same frame SHALL have the same byteorder.           Terminated with $00 00.     $02   UTF-16BE [UTF-16] encoded Unicode [UNICODE] without BOM.           Terminated with $00 00.     $03   UTF-8 [UTF-8] encoded Unicode [UNICODE]. Terminated with $00.

I guess SimplifyMedia doesn’t handle this $03 case, which a couple of my mp3 files have.

Hope this helps to fix the issue, and thanks again for the software!