Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

iTunes does not display Asian characters correctly.

A

akbc

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jul 11, 2008
369
0
Hello everyone.

I usually keep my music files on my PC and stuff, but since I was thinking of getting rid of it, I transferred all my music files into my MBP.

So I transferred it via a USB Drive, and what do you know, iTunes show some of my Korean and Japanese songs with broken-looking weird scribbles.

It happens to only certain songs, and I really am confused.

As you can see in the attached picture, some displays the correct characters, but some just looks weird. Like the bottom three songs show correctly, but not some of the top ones or the highlighted one.

However, both my iPhone and my iPods in the past showed ALL Korean/Japanese charcaters without a single problem.

Is there any language pack that I'll need to be installing?
Or is there some kind of encoding within the iTunes?

I am currently using the latest build/version of the iTunes on Mac OS X Leopard running on Unibody MacBook Pro 2.53Ghz.
The MacBook Pro is also up-to-date with any of the latest updates via Software Update.

I should be asking at the iPod and iTunes section I guess, so if it really seems like it's an absolute must that I post in the iTunes section, please let me know.

Any help would be greatly appreciated,
thank you in advance.
 

Attachments

  • Picture 1.gif
    Picture 1.gif
    34.8 KB · Views: 2,670
A

akbc

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jul 11, 2008
369
0
Yeah, the Korean/Japanese characters show perfectly fine on my iPhone like I said, I can type/read with no problem.

It's the iTunes that's messing me up, and I really don't know what to do :(

Just in case anyone is wondering, I guess I'll put down how I fixed it.

It was rather.. pretty simple. I just went to the "Get Info", and checked off all langauges except for Japanese and Korean. Then I restarted iTunes, and voila. It's done.

All languages show up correctly.
 
C

children

macrumors regular
Dec 22, 2008
248
0
ive got the same problem, but i dont really understand your resolution..
there is no languages in 'get info' (or is there another get info tab im unaware of?)

thanks
 
1

1ede2

macrumors newbie
Sep 14, 2009
8
0
I'm also having the same problem, can someone explain a little more in depth. I don't see any language options under "get info". I'm running snow leopard and itunes 9.:confused:
 
M

mace

macrumors newbie
Dec 6, 2009
1
0
having same problem

I'm having the same problem....and I couldn't find a language selector in "Get Info" either.

All my Korean songs displayed fine on my laptop running Windows XP but when I transferred my library to my new PC running Vista, some of the Korean songs show up as jibberish in iTunes.

I've tried reinstalling iTunes and I've tried reimporting the songs and nothing seems to work. It's not a matter of installing language packs or IMEs -- I've done that and my PC displays Korean fonts just fine, it's just inside iTunes that I'm having this problem and only with some of the Korean songs, not all the Korean songs.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks
 
ddd269

ddd269

macrumors regular
Jun 5, 2007
138
0
Torrance, CA
bump...

Somebody help on this please. I have the same issue.

On top of this, something weirder is happening. When sharing libraries in my home network, I can see the windows itune's song titles fine from my other macs but when I drag and drop, it turns in to garble. When transferring or copying files, initially the song info is a lighter shade (fonts looks perfect at this point) when the copying is complete and the song info turns dark (this is when the fonts get all messed up). Must be an OS X thing.

I've also noticed that (like someone else posted) not all files are like this. Some transfer fine. I did notice that new songs are more garbled than the older songs. My latest batch of newest songs are ALL messed up. Is there a "newer" Korean font that people are using that can be read on the web and through networks but is not compatible when stored in a mac?
 
kdum8

kdum8

macrumors 6502a
Sep 8, 2006
919
12
Tokyo, Japan
No solution here but another one with the problem. I want to have my OS language in Japanese, but it corrupts all my song names in iTunes if Japanese is the enabled system language. The songs are rendered correctly until I play them, and then they become corrupted. This happens especially if there are some non-letter characters in the song title, such as an apostrophe. Very annoying.


Anyone with a solution please chime in....
 
J

jpma

macrumors 6502
May 31, 2009
254
3
I made a similar post on apple discussion and came to a solution to my problem not displaying thai font on itune,

it's all about the ID3 Tag.

the link is here
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2322334&tstart=0

open up the ID3Mod app, load the itune, and select your music change to the correct language code, if it is displaying the correct one click save on it.(unable to undo once you save, so make sure you got the right one)

and on itune side, once you get info on that song it will update the language code.

hopefully this help.
 
ddd269

ddd269

macrumors regular
Jun 5, 2007
138
0
Torrance, CA
kdum8 said:
No solution here but another one with the problem. I want to have my OS language in Japanese, but it corrupts all my song names in iTunes if Japanese is the enabled system language. The songs are rendered correctly until I play them, and then they become corrupted. This happens especially if there are some non-letter characters in the song title, such as an apostrophe. Very annoying.


Anyone with a solution please chime in....
Click to expand...

Not a real solution, but it's working for me without using any other app.

Mine is doing the opposite. When my OS is set to English, it's all messed up. When I switch to Korean, it still shows garbled until I click on the song then it magically changes to the correct font. :confused: It displayed correctly for Korean, Japanese and Chinese character songs that I have. Must be a font thing. When I switch back to English it reverts back to the garbled font. Actually, all songs display correctly until I click or play it.

I haven't tried the ID3Mod yet, but I'll give it a try so I don't' have to switch back and forth from English to Korean system language.
 
J

jpma

macrumors 6502
May 31, 2009
254
3
hi,
there's no need to switch between language,
my major is english,
but on itune specific language song name will display in their own font such as thai japanese so on~
 
ddd269

ddd269

macrumors regular
Jun 5, 2007
138
0
Torrance, CA
jpma said:
hi,
there's no need to switch between language,
my major is english,
but on itune specific language song name will display in their own font such as thai japanese so on~
Click to expand...

I don't think you understand the problem... "itune specific" is what you're talking about, such as songs that are bought in itune store or ripped in itunes and id tags generated within itunes.

What we are talking about is transferring songs from a PC to a Mac that are not "itune specific".
 
calderone

calderone

Cancelled
Aug 28, 2009
3,743
352
I have had this issue with some of my music. Since most of it is from CDs it isn't very often. When I do, I simply retag. There are various encoding types for Asian languages, sometimes the Windows ones simply don't come through.

For example, I often hop on the Yahoo Japan Chat Rooms. Probably 50% of the users chatting are sending through Japanese encodings that get display as garbage for me.

There are even some websites where I simply cannot read the content, no matter which encoding I choose in the browser.

Since most of my music is Japanese, and I can read and write Japanese (and Chinese) I simply retag them myself.
 
ddd269

ddd269

macrumors regular
Jun 5, 2007
138
0
Torrance, CA
calderone said:
I have had this issue with some of my music. Since most of it is from CDs it isn't very often. When I do, I simply retag. There are various encoding types for Asian languages, sometimes the Windows ones simply don't come through.

For example, I often hop on the Yahoo Japan Chat Rooms. Probably 50% of the users chatting are sending through Japanese encodings that get display as garbage for me.

There are even some websites where I simply cannot read the content, no matter which encoding I choose in the browser.

Since most of my music is Japanese, and I can read and write Japanese (and Chinese) I simply retag them myself.
Click to expand...

For those of us that have a large collection of songs from a PC, this is not an option as it will take too long. You either have to find the original song before the garble or know the song by heart to change the tags. Not practical.
 
calderone

calderone

Cancelled
Aug 28, 2009
3,743
352
ddd269 said:
For those of us that have a large collection of songs from a PC, this is not an option as it will take too long. You either have to find the original song before the garble or know the song by heart to change the tags. Not practical.
Click to expand...

Fair enough. In situations like that there aren't many practical solutions. Good luck to you.
 
J

jon08

macrumors 68000
Nov 14, 2008
1,885
104
calderone said:
I have had this issue with some of my music. Since most of it is from CDs it isn't very often. When I do, I simply retag. There are various encoding types for Asian languages, sometimes the Windows ones simply don't come through.

For example, I often hop on the Yahoo Japan Chat Rooms. Probably 50% of the users chatting are sending through Japanese encodings that get display as garbage for me.

There are even some websites where I simply cannot read the content, no matter which encoding I choose in the browser.

Since most of my music is Japanese, and I can read and write Japanese (and Chinese) I simply retag them myself.
Click to expand...

Yeah, that's what I had to do with a number of my Chinese songs when I migrated from PC to Mac. It's a PITA, but apparently no better way of tagging your mp3s correctly. Fortunately I had all their EXTERNAL 'tags' correctly so I could just copy-paste those into the internal tags...
 
N

nyichiban

macrumors newbie
Sep 14, 2011
2
0
jon08 said:
Yeah, that's what I had to do with a number of my Chinese songs when I migrated from PC to Mac. It's a PITA, but apparently no better way of tagging your mp3s correctly. Fortunately I had all their EXTERNAL 'tags' correctly so I could just copy-paste those into the internal tags...
Click to expand...

Well I think I figured out how to fix this even though this thread is over a year old. The old method of "get Info" doesn't work anymore on newer ones. Someone had directed me to ID3Pro v2.0 on macupdate and it worked for me. Basically you load the songs into ID3Pro by searching the folder you downloaded the osngs to and in the encoding you choose MacJapanese (for japanese songs) and hit save. It'll go thru the ID3 tags and rename them in the proper format and then relaod the songs into iTunes and voila its good.
 
G

gocchisama

macrumors newbie
Jan 24, 2012
1
0
iTunes update

So I recently applied an update to my iTunes and restarted it. Now none of my Japanese characters (which showed up fine before the update) are showing up. I've tried switching the language and restarting, that didn't work. I know my computer is up to date on language settings because I can view asian characters anywhere else. It's just iTunes. Does anyone know how to fix this? Or am I seriously going to have to retype in the title, artist and album for my over 450 Japanese songs??? :(:confused:
 
G

gloryunited

macrumors 6502
Oct 29, 2010
316
1
jpma said:
it's all about the ID3 Tag.
Click to expand...

This.

And make sure you keep a copy of your music files on the PC side, in case something goes wrong, you won't have to go through each song and figure out which is which. (been there...)

Good luck :D

just noticed this thread is over 3 years old....
 
L

lxunyc

macrumors newbie
Dec 2, 2012
1
0
flypatrick0303 said:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/unicoderewriter/

This does it for me. I was able to convert all of my Chinese songs to Unicode format. Now my iTunes is able to display the characters correctly!

Hope it helps
Click to expand...

Thanks for this link. This is exactly what I've been looking for.

However, I'm having problem installing the the app on my PC. Did you have this problem? (And, if so, how do you bypass it?)

ETA - Never mind. Figured out after some further research. Thanks all the same!
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom