abcde generates MP3 metadata with incorrect character encoding

[Pete Gillin]

The version of abcde in precise seems to suffer from this bug: https://code.google.com/p/abcde/issues/detail?id=22 . Specifically, in a UTF-8 locale, it creates files where the encoding marker is 0x00, which means ISO-8859-1, but the byte stream is UTF-8. The result is that any program reading the tags which believes the encoding marker will interpret the UTF-8 bytes as ISO-8859-1. (It seems that Rhythmbox actually renders correctly, because it does not believe the encoding marker, but it also seems that it is an outlier here — this may mask the problem somewhat.)

They claim to have fixed the bug in June 2012: https://code.google.com/p/abcde/source/detail?r=360 . So I guess it's just a question of applying that patch. Any chance you can do this? It's pretty annoying having to manually fix all my files.

Thanks.

[andrew.46 (andrew-david-strong)]

I believe that newer versions of abcde have rectified the mp3 tagging issues. By default in 2.7.1 the tagging will be accomplished with eyed3 and options exist for id3v2 and even id3. Precise ships a very old version of abcde that may be a little too much trouble to patch up...

This is an old bug (2013) and if perhaps you are now running trusty have a look at Doug's PPA:

Ubuntu Multimedia for Trusty
https://launchpad.net/~mc3man/+archive/ubuntu/trusty-media

This contains abcde 2.7 as well as other goodies :)