Rhythmbox 0.9.1

Yes it is in CVS and will be in 0.9.2

I've been able to edit id3 tags with rhythmbox already for a while..0.9.0 did support that already, so just upgrade.
-WareKala

You shouldn't even need to edit your music information, it should be correct when ripped from cd / purchased from the online store.

This is not necessarily true. I've ripped a number of albums with latin characters in the names and they get stored incorrectly by Sound-Juicer/Gstreamer. Combine that with the fact people may want more than the base information provided by the ripper and you get a very real need for a tagger. Besides, with tagging support, Rhythmbox may be able to encorperate replay-gain, equalization, and perminent playcounts and ratings in a usable fashion.

It is absurd to think that a music store or ripper would provide for all a user's needs. And really, the "if you didn't do illegal things, you wouldn't need a tagger" attitude is just in bad taste.

http://my.opera.com/fundawang/homes/albums/2451/rhythmbox.png

Have you ever tried to read carefully the how-to? Try this:
export GST_ID3_TAG_ENCODING=GB18030
# or whatever the tag encoding you want

The problem is that a lot of tagging problems don't write the tags correctly (especially Windows ones). They write the tags in whatever the current user's encoding is, without setting the header specifying the encoding.

The mp3 players that display those tags correctly just assume that the encoding is whatever the current user's is. While that kind of works, there are two problems:

1) Some files that are correctly tagged (according to the standard) will no longer work.
2) It won't work if the default encoding of the tagger and the listener are different.

Number 1 is very important, because it means causing lots of problems for people with taggers that aren't broken.

Hi..

I really have not a single problem with id3 data in rhythmbox.... sure rb has many many many many other problems and missing features.. but this particular point is actually quite stable.

Greets
Waldgeist

Thanks to the current maintainers, rhythmbox is quickly catching up in terms of features and bugfixes. Current CVS has support for the following:

CD playing with musicbrainz integration, audioscrobbler, podcasts

There is also a patch in bugzilla to add cover art support, which will hopefully be HIGified and integrated soon.

What is missing:

Equalizer, Visualization (Totem has support for gstreamer's visual effects, so code could be taken from there), tag editing (I use cowbell), support for other portable players (apart from ipod).

Tristan

He means: you cannot read the id3 if it's encoded in Asian language (CJK = Chinese Japanese Korean). Which is a shame, as gnome seems to have good i18n support. I'm wondering though, is there a way to get the encoding of the id3 tag, or have we to rely on dirty heuristics to get it ?

http://img495.imageshack.us/img495/8141/rhythmboxcjkide7kk.png

The only problem is that most windows, and some unix id3 programs just save it as UTF, but never actually set the UTF-8 bit, so players can't detect if it is or isn't. Use easytag to make the id3 tag in utf8, and then use a little java program called id3conv to properly set the flag. Rhythmbox actually has some of the best id3 tag support i've seen in a player.

Now it makes sense to me :o)...

But then he really only needs to "retag" his mp3s with a serious tagging tool like "Audio Tag Tool" which is great ( hopefully it works with utf-8 and non-western languages ). If i get a mp3 from a friend or somewhere i always need to retag them.. because they are tagged so badly...

Greets
Waldgeist

The id3 standard demands that the tags are encoded using ISO 8859-1. This of course means that non-western languages are not supported by the standard. The result of this have been that many ignore the standards demands for ISO 8859-1 and use something else. Many Unix/Linux applications use UTF-8 these days, but older Linux taggers probably just used the characterset of the local machine. Windows and MacOSX taggers used other stuff again. Anyway this means that id3 is quite a mess where there tags are encoded is a wide variety of charactersets, yet the parser have no good way of identifying which one. I am not sure if rb assumes it is ISO 8859-1 or UTF-8 (hopefully UTF-8).

The solution to the problem is retag all the files with a tool that creates UTF-8 tags and make sure rb assumes UTF-8 tags.

The encoding of orginal design of the id3 tag is iso88591 only. Plus there is no language field in mp3 format design. Double troubles make the problem. There is only one application can solve this problem (so far as I know), Beep-Media-Player's mpeg plugin has a filter to convert (see this). Should there may other one KDE music box can do this. But I cannot remember the name.

The solution is to not use id3v1 tags, but id3v2 which has a field for showing if the tags are iso8859-1, utf-8, or utf-16.

Correct Language display is critical for open source software deployment in Chinese country. As we know all Linux distributions are going to use unicode by default. Unfortunately, there are too many files name cannot bs displayed correctly. Much of people over there thus still stick to the obsolete big5 in Taiwan and GB in China when using Linux. If there is any file exchange, it will cause problem. In fact, this always happen. One of the alternative solution they found is - DON'T USE LINUX.

Oh please. This is just trollish. For example, a default Ubuntu install is UTF-8 and I have no problems at all.

Well, the dashboard website (http://www.nat.org/dashboard/) last got updated at the end of 2003 (or at least the blog did anyway), so it's probably pretty dead. Or at least, dead enough that it wasn't worth keeping the code in.

Dashboard isn't so much gone, as it's transmuted into beagle. Dashboard may resurrect in the future as a companion to Beagle