One easy question:

Which program do ACTUALLY work for writing UTF8 tags that can be read in Amarok 1.4 ?

Easytag doesnt, Kid3 doesnt.... any more? (batch processing required)

easytag does write utf8 tags that can be read by amarok - however amarok doesn't write tags that easytag can read. This is because amarok uses taglib, and writes id3v2.4 tags, while easytag uses id3lib which only reads/writes id3v2.3.

then please can you  post the exact options in easytag (about forcing unicode and charsets) ?

and please try to write a tag with this character "風" and see if it appears in amarok?

I don't actually have easytag installed anymore (once I converted all my tags, I didn't need it anymore)- so I can't double-check. I'm sure someone else will though.

AFAIK id3 v2.3 does not support utf-8. Only v2.4 does.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id3_tag

dangle_wtf wrote:easytag does write utf8 tags that can be read by amarok - however amarok doesn't write tags that easytag can read. This is because amarok uses taglib, and writes id3v2.4 tags, while easytag uses id3lib which only reads/writes id3v2.3.

From what I've heard, the latest version of EasyTag actually uses TagLib, and thus should be able to write v2.4. Haven't verified this though.

It seems that EasyTag uses libid3tag and id3lib, but not TagLib: (from http://easytag.sourceforge.net/)

Before to install and use EasyTAG you need to install the following libraries (see below to download it) :
    - libid3tag (required),
    - id3lib (optional, except to write ID3v2.3 tags in MP3 files),
    - libogg and libvorbis (optional, except to support Ogg Vorbis and FLAC files),
    - flac (optional, except to support FLAC files),
    - libmp4v2 (optional, except to support MP4/ACC files),
    - wavpack (optional, except to support WavPack files),

In KID3 you can choose whether taglib or id3lib should be used (to switch between ID3 version 2.3 and 2.4). Maybe you want to try that.

Thanks for the tip! I'll try that.

kid3 shows that lame does v2.3 and the title is shown incorrectly in ISO-8859-1, when it's saved as utf-8. Converting to v2.4 with kid3 changes nothing. Even kid3 shows the title wrong.

I've configured kid3 to use TagLib and to save new tags with UTF-8

Konqueror shows the title in the same way. This makes me think TagLib is not handling UTF-8 tags correctly.

khexedit shows the original tag text 'Hän' in hex as following:

48 c3 a4 6e

and this is correct utf-8.

Lame marks the tag encoding always as ISO-8859-1. See http://amarok.kde.org/forum/index.php/t ... 972.0.html for details how to patch lame to mark tags as UTF-8