4. Re-encoding mp3 tags¶

Linux systems have long been using UTF-8, a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Windows is, in many cases, contrary to this standard. For the Cyrillic web, CP1251 is a flagrant example: it has become so overwhelming that webmasters simply forget to specify the encoding they used to create their site pages.

Similarly, Russian mp3 tags are often CP1251-encoded.

In version ID3v2.4, a fortunate possibility to store tags in the UTF-8 format was added.

Calculate Linux Desktop includes the media-libs/mutagen package, which handles metadata tags. To re-encode all tags of your mp3 music collection to UTF-8, go to the music directory and execute:

find -iname '*.mp3' -print0 | xargs -0 mid3iconv -eYOUR_ENCODING --remove-v1

The "--remove-v1" option will remove the older version.