DJ Mugen – Infinitely Danceable

So I was getting pissed that whenever I listened to Hüsker Dü or Björk lately, the characters with umlauts would get all f’d up and it would change the name to Bj^rk or H^sker D^. Same was true of any characters with diacritics, etc. So I turned to Google for some answers and found a solution.

Appears to be the case that iTunes 7.7 on the Mac (maybe Windows, who knows?) hates outdated versions of ID3 tags (the things that fill in all the info on iTunes when you download… er… import… yeah… mp3s and such) and BREAKS them into tiny bits of goofy-ass characters if they have special (read: non-English) characters.

Solution: “select all” in your music list. Then go to the “Advanced” pull-down menu. Select “Convert ID3 Tags” from the menu choices, then choose “2.4” for the version you’d like to use. Once you do that (and basically upgrade the ID3 tag version for all your mp3s (or AACs or whatever), you will no longer have the “disappearing umlaut” problem.

Cheers.

Reference: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080712064910551