long story short...
1.) i have a considerable collection of mp3s of japanese bands and groups.
2.) mp3gain apparently does not like it when the mp3's have any characters in the filename that are not viewable in DOS.
for example, i do most of my tagging and such in mp3tag and manage the actual library (which i share with my mac) via itunes.
both mp3tag and itunes happily display the Japanese characters, but any mp3s that contain the Japanese characters in the filename do not even show up in the list of files to be analyzed in mp3gain.
SO, i have been pleased with the results of mp3gain so far, but this is kind of a deal breaker for me. many of the songs are not normalized, and worse some bands that utilize english for some of their song names end up with those songs normalized and other songs on the same album not.
I have searched around a bit, but not come up with anything conclusive. The creator of mp3gain hasn't answered my e-mails either.
Any suggestions? An alternate program that does the same thing (or better) as mp3gain? I do realize that I could get around this by renaming ALL of my Japanese mp3s so they don't have the characters in the filenames, but that is kind of a pain.
The funny part is that mp3gain has "Japanese" available as a language for the interface...but can't read files with Japanese in the name.
Thanks in advance.
Did you try the beta version of MP3gain? It includes an experimental Unicode support which might help with your problem. I think I managed to mp3gain some files with kanji tags and filenames, but I'm not 100% sure. Do you know if the filenames correspond to Unicode or some Japanese character encoding such as Shift JIS?
Did you try the beta version of MP3gain? It includes an experimental Unicode support which might help with your problem. I think I managed to mp3gain some files with kanji tags and filenames, but I'm not 100% sure. Do you know if the filenames correspond to Unicode or some Japanese character encoding such as Shift JIS?
they are tagged using information that was imported via things like mediamonkey. using the autotag function. if you are not familiar with that, it pulls the song names and such off amazon.co.jp (in the case of these japanese albums) and fills out the tags automagically. considering they display under pretty much all other circumstances (except DOS under Windows... stupid microsoft), including on the command line on both my mac and the freebsd file server under which they are stored, i'm assuming it's unicode.
i was trying to get the beta mp3gain, but it seems all the links on it's page were broken... i did find it on sourceforge though, and i'm actually giving it a shot right now.
update: it sees the files now, but the characters still show up as strings of ????? since mp3gain never touches the actual filename, this SHOULD be an acceptable alternative (i hope) but i'd still prefer something that could both see the files correctly and level them in a way that is reversible. tall order i know, but again thanks for any responses.
Try applocale.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppLocale (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppLocale)
EDIT: Useful (?) link: http://alcahest.club.fr/perso/apploc/applocale.html (http://alcahest.club.fr/perso/apploc/applocale.html)
Try applocale.
good call, i almost forgot about this! i'll give this a shot and post with results.
foobar2000 supports your request (Replaygain + Unicode support) perfectly.
I found the solution right here to this.
http://www.vector.co.jp/soft/dl/winnt/art/se492947.html
download this version of Mp3gain, this dont need de second archive (its the language package) it really works!! :D :D
I have another issue to add to this. I downloaded the unicode beta of MP3Gain, but when I try to add my future funk folder which is loaded with japanese characters it will load about half of the folders and totally skip others even though they will both have unicode characters in them... I can add the files with the Add files button though which is weird and just annoying to add every folder like that :(
Anyone else have this problem and know if there is a work-around?
Thanks in advance.
Why not try foobar2000 instead? As William already suggested.