If you have some old mp3 files, where the tag information is not in english and years ago you have used an encoding your current music player does not understand? The answer is easy – covert to Unicode. First I tried doing it manually, and it works if you have less than 10 tracks. Let’s just say I had more…
I have tried several approaches (all on linux): id3iconv-0.2.1, EasyTag, etc.
It is possible I was missing something, but I could accomplish my task and change the encoding. id3iconv-0.2.1 just removed foreign characters, so that no recovery would have helped (good I had a backup).
And then I found a set of python tools: python-mutagen-1.11.
It was enough to one script (below) and all my tracks had Unicode tags:
mid3iconv -e CP1251 *.mp3
You have to specify the incoming encoding, mine was CP1251 (Windows – Cyrillic).
After trying lots of these tools, I was kind of skeptic about this one as well. If you run it in verbose dry run mode, it will say what it would normally just do. This way you can get full confidence that you specified the initial encoding correctly and that the tool will work at all without changing anything.
mid3iconv -e CP1251 -p -d *.mp3
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