iTunes 7.7 Corrupts Accented Artist and Track Names

Earlier this week I played a track called "K�ssen" by German singer Stefan Runge. I was surprised to see that it was listed as "K,ssen" in iTunes. I corrected it, and thought no more about it, until I saw this article on TidBITS and all became clear.

Surprisingly, it would seem that this track is the only track in my library (which contains tracks with titles in French, Spanish and German and artists with accents in their names) to be affected.

On 25-Jul-2008, at 04:35, John W Baxter wrote:
> So is this bug cross-platform?

I have soem japanese tracks that don't seem to be bugged:

Wo Qui Non Coin (しょんぼりショートversion)
かわいそうなフェイ (リップクリーム)
遊園地
and 23話

Japanese doesn't have accents, though it has a lot of other
peculiarities...

George

On 27-Jul-2008, at 12:36, George Wade wrote:
> Japanese doesn't have accents, though it has a lot of other
> peculiarities...

True, but most people when they say 'accented' characters, they really
mean 'any character that's not on a standard US keyboard', so é, but
also å, œ, ü, and ß, none of which are 'accented'.

I found that iTunes 7.7 not only screws up 'special' characters in id3 tags
of tracks that it plays, but also of tracks that you do a Cmd-I on. In fact,
entering any 'special' characters, even on not yet messed up tracks, resulted
in messed up text :( I needed to first convert the ID3 tag to version 2.4.
Only then did iTunes allow me to enter 'special' characters.

Bug report submitted to <https://bugreporter.apple.com/>.


--
Sander Tekelenburg, <http://www.euronet.nl/~tekelenb/>

I started looking at this and got a bit confused--there are lots of tracks in
my 12K song library that could theoretically have issues, but nothing has shown
up yet.

(1) Does the connection to ID3 tags mean that the corruption only happens to
MP3 files? The Wikipedia description of ID3 tags indicates they are a part of
the MP3 file format, and Get Info does not show ID3 tag version information for
my .m4a and .m4p files.

(The vast majority of my library consists of .m4a files ripped from my CD
collection, so if this is an MP3-specific issue I can relax a bit.)

(2) The problem is said to appear when the track "is played"--does that only
mean played in iTunes, or does the corruption also happen when iTunes updates
play count or timestamp information for a track that was played on an iPod?

I selected just the MP3 files (I enabled the view of the "Kind" column and
sorted on that--they have a "kind" of "MPEG Audio File".) So far, so good.

Dave Scocca

Unfortunately this also affects AIFF files. Since I'm a classical
musician with practically only AIFF files in my library (and many with
accented titles at that), this is a real headache as the ID3 Tag
conversion workaround isn't an option for me!

Any other suggestions, or must I wait for a fix from Apple? :-(

Sincerely,
'eccparis'

On Jul 30, 2008, at 11:55 AM, Evelyn Chan wrote:

> Unfortunately this also affects AIFF files. Since I'm a classical
> musician with practically only AIFF files in my library (and many with
> accented titles at that), this is a real headache as the ID3 Tag
> conversion workaround isn't an option for me!


This is off-topic, but why do you have AIFF files, why not use Apple
Lossless? They take up much less space and offer the same quality?


Kirk

Hmmm... Reading this thread got me curious and took at look at my
library in iTunes, I have a lot of songs with accented titles or
artists, some of which are from back when I was encoding with AAC and
they seem not to be affected but I did finally find an mp3-encoded
album with accents in both the titles and the artists :

A L'envers � L'endroit : Noir D�sir

Shows up fine. Looks like maybe I finally managed to miss a problem ?

Christopher Appell
BPG Europe

--On 7/30/08 2:55 AM -0700 Evelyn Chan wrote:

> Unfortunately this also affects AIFF files. Since I'm a classical
> musician with practically only AIFF files in my library (and many with
> accented titles at that), this is a real headache as the ID3 Tag
> conversion workaround isn't an option for me!
>
> Any other suggestions, or must I wait for a fix from Apple? :-(

As of this morning, Software Update shows iTunes 7.7.1. Unfortunately, the
release notes say nothing more than:

> iTunes 7.7.1 includes fixes to improve stability and performance.

So--it might be fixed. I guess a get-info on one track subject to the problem
might be enough to see whether the problem is fixed, but I don't have such a
track at hand...

Dave Scocca

According to a poster at Versiontracker, this new version 7.7.1 fixes
the accent problem!

am 31.07.2008 11:05 Uhr schrieb tidbits-talktidbits.com unter
tidbits-talktidbits.com:
>
> (1) Does the connection to ID3 tags mean that the corruption only happens to
> MP3 files? The Wikipedia description of ID3 tags indicates they are a part of
> the MP3 file format, and Get Info does not show ID3 tag version information
> for my .m4a and .m4p files

Well, as I'm living in Germany I do have quite some files in my iTunes
library with filenames which consists of more than only the standard US
ASCII characters...

When I started playing such a file, iTunes replaced the non-US-ASCII
characters with some gibberish - however, when I opened the info pane of
that file within iTunes I could enter the correct character again and it
stayed that way even though it was still an ID3 v.2.3 tag.

It seems, after correcting iTunes misbehaviour the entries stay that way
even when it's not an ID3 v.2.4 tag.

Udo

I hadn't noticed any odd behavior in iTunes, had played tracks with
accented track names as recently as this morning, until this afternoon
when I added an album downloaded from CD Baby (http://cdbaby.com/cd/atongozimba
  if you were curious). All the tracks with titles containing an
accented "e" are garbled. The MP3 files look like they were created in
2007, presumedly before this was an issue, using ID3 Tag 2.3.

I am running iTunes 7.7.1, OS 10.5.4 (Intel)

Seth Anderson
often found at www.b12partners.net/wp