Japanese text support for Walkman app?

[jasperlynch]

Hi, 

Part of my music library includes music with Japanese text.

Is there a way for this app to do this?

Kind regards

[sushimonster]

Possible yes, but it's a bit hit-and-miss. Make sure you do the following in the order:
1). Make sure the ID3 tags for your music files are all in unicode.
2). Set your phone's display language to Japanese (Korean works as well, and I'll assume Chinese works too, though I've never tried that).
3). Connect to the computer and move your files over.
4). Start up Walkman and enjoy.

One thing to note; if you already have music files on your phone with garbled text, those need to be deleted off the phone and moved back onto the phone while your phone is set to display an Asian language. You can't just switch language after moving your files and expect it to display correctly; it won't work that way.

I've lived in Japan a few years and am Korean-born, so I have the luxury of being able to leave my phone's UI in any of those two (or three including English) languages. This may not be everyone's fancy though.

Another thing; if the above still results in garbled text / metadata, you probably don't have your ID3 tags in unicode. I use a freeware called Easy CD-DA Extractor, and set all the metadata fields there and save (it'll save it into unicode if not already).

Have a C6603 (Z, international version) and this works all the time. Also have a LT18i (Arc S) and the above worked for that as well.

EDIT - Have a good 20GB of .mp3 and .flac files with Japanese and Korean metadata and they all display without garble.

[jasperlynch]

Thanks for the info! Will try this asap.

Do you have experience using mp3tag for this? If no, I'll try for myself and see what happens - if it saves the tags in unicode.

Kinda bummed that it doesn't work by default.

[sushimonster]

This is actually not a fault of Android. Rather it's an inherent fault with language implementation in the devices.

I've got a 13 year old iRiver MP3 player (yeah, probably older than some people here...) which suffers from this issue. More specifically, Korean and Japanese ID3 tags are garbled when I set the UI to English (though they display correctly when I set the UI language to Korean or Japanese). Also have a DCube MP3 player (approx 11 years old), which suffers from the same issue, as well as a Samsung YP-T8 from 2005 which again has this issue.

More detailed: I would assume that when a language is set to display English it loads a single-byte font database onto the device's memory. Whereas Japanese (and I understand Korean too) by default make use of double-byte standards (but East-Asian language standards are designed to be backward compatible with the single-byte standard). Hence the garble we see on the UI when trying to display Asian text on a single-byte display (ie, the UI set to English).

Unicode (UTF-8) on the other hand is capable of displaying anything with a single byte; your device just has to be compatible.

Yeah. That's my understanding of it anyways.

Now, the curious thing with Android is that whilst it does suffer very similar issues as my devices mentioned, once you moved your files with Asian metadata over while your phone was set to an Asian language display, if you change your UI language back to English, the garble won't occur for those files you just moved.  Probably a bug of some sort I guess.

And to answer your question; no. Have never tried mp3tag. Sounds like a dedicated ID3 tagger (in which case I would assume it stores metadata in unicode)