How to Auto Convert MP3 ID3 Tag Charset to Unicode (UTF-8)

MP3 songs, music tracks and audio files contains built-in enclosed metadata container called ID3 which allows information such as title, artist, album, track number, and other information to be stored in the MP3 file itself. The ID3 tags allow software based media player such as Windows Media Player, iTunes, WinAmp, etc. and hardware-based media player such as iPod, Zune, and other MP3 player to recognize and display the music details on the for files management or show on LCD screen of the gadget.

The problem or issue is that the MP3 ID3 tags which does not been added or entered on local computers can have different character set code page for character encoding, such as English, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Arabic, Thai, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Celtic, Baltic, Latin, Polish and etc. Different character encoding used on text entered in ID3 tags and the media player, be it hardware or software (software-based media player normally uses system locale set in operating system) causes some characters and symbols cannot be shown or displayed properly or unreadable as system does not have the characters.

When the music tracks, songs or audio clips in MP3 format embedded with tags encoded with traditional charsets, especially for non-Western European languages, the characters may not be displayed properly, gibberish, unintelligible, appear as question marks or squares, or simply as weird garbage character. The wrong character encoding issue problem also happens to playlist which contains MP3 tracks with traditional character encoding.

The issue can be solved if the ID3 tags is written and stored in Unicode (UTF-8) character encoding format, which contains most if not all characters for most languages in the world, and supported by all operating system for software-based media player and hardware-based media player gadget. In some player, user can force the encoding for specific code page, but then it’s impossible to display tags of several international languages at the same time if files are so encoded.

Users can re-type and re-enter the ID3 tags of MP3 in Unicode charset encoding manually for each and every MP3s. However, it’s much easier to be able to let software utility automatically convert and change the character encoding of ID3 tags to Unicode (UTF-8). Here are a few software utilities that can do the conversion.

Chacon (foo_chacon) for foobar2000

Chacon (an acronym for charset convertor) is a simple tool for fixing tags by converting them between different character sets. User can directly access the functionality from the context menu and for any number of tracks at once, by right clicking and select Tagging -

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