[typified]

im in the process of transferring songs from an external hd to itunes on my new ibook. the problem im having is with the songs that have titles written in chinese...they display fine as im browsing them on the hd but when itunes gets a hold of them they aren't displaying properly (unfriendly symbols and whatnot). i know its possible for itunes to display asian language fonts but the few chinese albums i have on my hd don't seem to be cooperating.
as far as blindly trying to fix this problem myself...i've tried going itunes > services > chinesetextconverter but to be honest im not sure exactly how or when i should be using this feature, regardless it didn't seem to do anything.
im a big time mac newbie so any info on this would be great

[Franz Josef]

I've displayed Japanese podcasts correctly in iTunes so it handles Kanji characters correctly. Does Consolidate library in the Advanced tab in iTunes not import correctly?

[typified]

hmmm, itunes doesn't seem to have any problem seeing these files or playing them, its just that the titles are all garbled up and unreadable... i've been messing around with the ID3 tags under the advanced tab but none of the various settings have any effect on the song titles other than changing the unreadable symbols into other unreadable symbols.

[v.noir]

Chinese displays fine for me in iTunes, both titles i've entered and also titles grabbed from CDDB. I'm sure it'd work fine if you re-entered all the titles & artists by hand, but that could take a while if you have lots... If you still have the CDs, then re-import them and let it get the details from the Internet again.

[typified]

yeah that sounds like the best way to go at this point. thanks guys

[stevegong]

no, wait, don't do that yet.

I think there's some way to convert the ID3 tags into the right encoding. There has to be, because I thought OS X was very good with chinese language support.

[The Return of the 'nut]

Originally Posted by stevegong no, wait, don't do that yet. I think there's some way to convert the ID3 tags into the right encoding. There has to be, because I thought OS X was very good with chinese language support.

I'm not really sure if it does real time translation such as that though. It does of system text (like the menus and everything) but changling languages isnt going to change the ID3 tags. You could I guess use the translation widget for all of the tags but that'd probably take as long as reentering them anyways.

[typified]

i went back and messed around with the ID3 tags after changing something in the compute's language options. when i used the reverse unicode this time it changed from the garbled symbols to korean mixed in with the garbled symbols. still not exactly what im looking for but i think im on the right track.