Unicode Rewriter

Unicode Rewrite is a Java tool to convert ID3 tags in MP3 files from whatever machine encoding you have (GB2312/GBK for Chinese, etc) to Unicode. It converts both ID3v1 tags and ID3v2 tags to Unicode-encoded ID3v2 (v2.3 or v2.4)

Friday, August 04, 2006

Introduction

I have many MP3 files which were ripped under Traditional Chinese version of Windows. The ID3 tags are encoding using Big5. As I am also a Mac OS X user, I use iTunes to listen to the MP3 files. Unfortunately, iTunes is unable to understand Big5 encoding. It only accepts Unicode. After a little research in the Internet, I found that Chinese Rewriter can solve my problem. Chinese Rewriter can convert ID3 tags of every MP3 file from Big5 to Unicode. Only one at a time. There is no way to convert a batch of MP3 files with a few mouse clicks. As I do not have much knowledge in ID3 tags, I looked for other software to solve my problem, Incidentialy I found ID3iconv which works find for me. Since ID3iconv is a command line tool, it would make my life easier if there is a graphical user interface (GUI) for it. Unicode Rewriter is thus born.