ISO 8859-1 or UTF-8 for tagging FLAC files

2022-10-01 10:08:00

Hello, I'm using the Kid3 tagging software for Linux. I've noticed the default encoding is set to ISO-8859-1. I'm not sure if that applies for FLAC/Vorbis or just MP3 files (perhaps FLAC handles that automatically? I have no idea). I was wondering if I should switch to UTF-8. I don't have unicode characters in the name of songs but I use characters like

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Re: ISO 8859-1 or UTF-8 for tagging FLAC files

Reply #1 – 2022-10-01 11:34:04

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis_comment:  "The data is encoded in UTF-8"
But ID3v2 tags for MP3 should be UTF-16: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID3#ID3v2

Re: ISO 8859-1 or UTF-8 for tagging FLAC files

Reply #2 – 2022-10-01 21:37:21

FLAC uses Vorbis comments, not ID3 tags. Vorbis comments use UTF-8.

Re: ISO 8859-1 or UTF-8 for tagging FLAC files

Reply #3 – 2022-10-01 23:06:12

Yes, that's what I said.

Re: ISO 8859-1 or UTF-8 for tagging FLAC files

Reply #4 – 2022-10-02 00:01:32

According to the manual, the text encoding settings only apply to ID3. FLAC doesn't use ID3, so it won't affect your FLAC files.