Hebrew & other foreign language fonts for iPods?

[BagelTycoon]

Despite being able to import Hebrew songs into iTunes 4.0, and being able to see the artists, albums, and song tracks in Hebrew fonts, the songs don't show up in my iPod in Hebew -- just a blank screen.

My local Apple retail store 'genius' explained, rather foolishly, that there simply wasn't enough room in an iPod to hold more language fonts -- as if a 20-40GB PowerBook can't hold multiple language fonts, but a 20-40GB iPod can't.

Currently, the iPod supports 14 languages (English, Korean?, Danish, German, Spanish, Dutch, French, Italian, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Japanese, and what appear to be 2 Chinese dialects).

Does anyone no of any decent 3rd party apps out there that let users add other languages to their iPods?

Does anyone know why Apple has ruled out other languages (e.g., Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Turkish, Polish, Czek, Hungarian), and what's behind that decision?

[janey]

is there a reason why you need more languages? most people make do with one, and stuff...
guess those 14 languages are like the languages iPod users are most likely to know/understand.
The only language i remotely even care about is korean, impresses all my korean friends :)

and that genius is a dumbass. if apple wanted to add anotehr language it wouldnt be too hard. guess you just need to figure out how to...no 3rd party apps should be available, Apple doesnt make their stuff public, hard to write apps :)

[BagelTycoon]

Originally posted by übergeek
is there a reason why you need more languages? most people make do with one, and stuff...
guess those 14 languages are like the languages iPod users are most likely to know/understand.
The only language i remotely even care about is korean, impresses all my korean friends :)


Yeah, the basic reason is that unless the foreign language character fonts are supported by the iPod -- like they are in iTunes -- then the song, artist, and album simply don't show up on the iPod.

Even though they're there, and playable, 'they show' up as blanks.

Mutli-lingual users can go through the painstaking process of translating the foreign language tracks into English themselves, but that's a bass-ackwards way of dealing with the problem -- especially when the foreign CDs are already in the CDDB, and most foreign language character fonts are supported in iTunes.

[Powerbook G5]

.

[firewire2001]

that "genius" actually probably knows very well what he is talking about.

the fonts and the ipod's operating system are extremely likely to be held on rom. i am sure the os is not on the hard drive.

it is very possible the rom that was chosen did not have space for these fonts.

and i take offense to your comment g5. israeli music is very often just like american music and it generally appeals to the crowd of people who are within the israeli culture.

it has absolutely nothing to do with if you are jewish or not.

[Powerbook G5]

I didn't mean for it to be offensive, just a joke. I realize it's a popular music type, just as Indian music seems to becoming popular over here. I'll delete my post if you'd wish me to.

[junior]

Originally posted by Powerbook G5
I didn't mean for it to be offensive, just a joke. I realize it's a popular music type, just as Indian music seems to becoming popular over here. I'll delete my post if you'd wish me to.


Wasn't very funny mate.

[miloblithe]

I wish Russian was a bigger market. It would be a good one to add too because it could approximate a lot of other cyrillic alphabets.

[janey]

Originally posted by firewire2001
that "genius" actually probably knows very well what he is talking about.
the fonts and the ipod's operating system are extremely likely to be held on rom. i am sure the os is not on the hard drive.
it is very possible the rom that was chosen did not have space for these fonts.

um you might be right (actually on second thought you are, about the OS being on the ROM), but what if the language stuff was stored on the hard drive?
After all, there's always that little somethign that takes up like a few MB when you first get an iPod or reformat it.