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Topic: kode's foo_id3v2 BOM checkbox (Read 2093 times) previous topic - next topic
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kode's foo_id3v2 BOM checkbox

I am using ID3v2 in my mp3 files with foobar2000 and haven't had any problems until now. All tags display correctly in the player.

However when I scan my music directory with Rio Music Manager I always get the ÿ (00FF in unicode) character before artist, album, title, genre and date tags. This character does not appear in foobar2000.

The problem is that the tags are transferred with this unwanted character to my mp3 player. 

I investigated and if I disable the "write BOM in strings" checkbox of foo_id3v2 the unwanted character disappears and all seems well. I assume that Rio Music Manager does not handle UTF-16 encoded fields with BOM properly.

My questions are:
1.  Is there any problem in disabling this "write BOM in strings" checkbox in foo_id3v2? I ask this because when trying to disable it I get a popup asking if I know what I am doing and I really don't. I confess... 
2.  If I use ISO-8859-1 encoded tags the problem also disappears. Is this safer than disabling the BOM in UTF-16 tags? I don't know if it is so simple, but which one should I use?

thanks

kode's foo_id3v2 BOM checkbox

Reply #1 –
Well, at least I can help you know what you are doing.

The BOM is the "Byte Order Marker". It's supposed to precede Unicode text in order to tell the computer what the byte order of the text that follows it is.

As you have found, not all Unicode capable tag software understands the BOM. Therefore leaving it out is a fine option there.

The real concern about not having a BOM is that if you were transferring the files to a machine with a different byte ordering, it wouldn't be able to read them properly.

If you're not planning on moving the files to a Mac or anywhere off your own system, then don't worry about it, generally. If it works, then it works, and that's what matters.
 

kode's foo_id3v2 BOM checkbox

Reply #2 –
Thanks for the explanation. I guess I'll just disable it then.