I have a bunch of MP3s I picked up in China that I've recently loaded into the iTunes on my Macbook at work. Because I need to run OSX in an English language setting all of the track's names and song titles have reverted to some type of font coding symbols and not 汉字. If I switch the system back to Chinese and double click the song in iTune, bam! Back to 汉字.

Any idea why this is happening and how to make the 汉字stick one I'm in an English language OS? I don't seem to have this problem with songs that were either authored or ripped at at time when the OS was in English, so I suspect it has something to do with the input method, a Mac vs PC issue, or a combination of both.

This might do what you want:
http://zhehou.blogspot.com/2010/09/how-to-deal-with-those-messy-codes-in.html

If you try it out, let me know how it goes; I have a few Chinese tunes with mis-encoded info, too.

I had the same problem with a bunch of Russian MP3s and wrote a program to fix them.

This problem arises because the tags in the MP3 use a Chinese encoding, but don't SAY they use a Chinese encoding. This was a problem with ID3v1 tags but should be a non-problem with ID3v2.

James

Downloading now. Will update after I give it a try. Thanks! I actually had this question fielded on the Mac Cast podcast last week and stumped the host Adam completely. Should have turned to the Skritter community in the first place!

I have this same problem quite frequently, i mean to write a program to do it but havent got around to it yet. Basically what happens is this:

Mainland china use: Guobiao (ie GB18030)
Taiwan uses: BIG5
International standard encoding used by mac: Unicode (ie UTF8, UTF16)

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

I forgot to add that unicode (UTF8, UTF16 and so on), are the only encodings that will work when the mac is switched from one region to another. Same for PC.

Mac and more recently Windows 7 now use unicode as the standard encoding for all characters.

@董雅各 I'd be happy to send you the program I wrote to fix mp3 encoding issues. Drop me an email if you like. jww1066 (same user name) at gmail.

James