PDA

View Full Version : iTunes + character set


MANOWAR^
11-08-2004, 12:53 PM
Ok I am having a really irritating problem. I just finished going through my
entire 1000 CD collection ripping it, and tagging it, renaming it to exactly
how I want it to be. All of this was done on my Slackware box. Now I want to
use my PowerBook + iTunes + iPod to manage it from this point on. However, I am having some really screwy issues with this.

The music is smb mounted on the laptop and some artists, actually all artists and albums, containing . in their names OS X goes crazy on. So if I have T.N.T. for an artists I will see T7G4& or something of the sort. I am assuming that its character set problem or just the fact the OS X does file type recognition based on extension instead of the sensible based on content. But that I can live with.

What THE REAL pain in the ass problem is that iTunes refuses to read some id3v2.4 tags with . in them. So say if I have T.N.T. and try to import it iTunes imports it but it does not recognize the tags.

Now before someone asks yes the entire collection is 2.4. Anyone have any ideas as to how to get iTunes/OS X to not go crazy at .? I have pretty much narrowed it down to it having a problem with the character set since I just tested it with creating a directory and a file with a whole bunch of . in it and OS X didn't have issues with it.

However, I am unable to find out what the default OS X character set is, so I
can convert my collection to it. Oh yeah and while we are talking about that,
the iPod has no problem displaying any of the tags iTunes cannot. Btw I am
running 10.3.6, iTunes 4.7, 3g iPod, on the server side its samba3.

MANOWAR^
11-10-2004, 03:21 PM
Well I have made some really disturbing discoveries. iTunes supports coverting tags to 2.4 but it apperantly only read/writes 2.2 and it can convert them to 2.4 but it is able to read the 2.4 it has converted itself. So if you have applications that write 2.4 tags then you are funked up.

I am still having issues with trying to get my samba shares to display the right characters. I have tried setting the samaba config option for display characters, unix, dos to iso8859-1 (which is latin - 1, which is what I belive os x uses) but still no luck with . in file names. Localy os x doesn't have any problem displaying them (aka if I create the file on my desktop or something...).

Anyone have any scripts/suggestions as to how to get iTunes to use the 2.4 tags?