OK, I'm just curios who was the smart guy who decided to drop German scharfes-s in $ascii()? Is it that hard to cover the common Western EU languages (ISO-8859-1) decently? Scharfes-s goes to ss, Vowel+umlaut goes to Vowel-e (eg ae, oe etc).
50 CDs ruined.
That's the ASCII (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascii) standard.
Tagging of 50 CDs should be fairly easy to properly retag with first fixing the album/artist tags by release and then fixing the title tracks by once selecting all tracks and then editing the title tag track by track.
The $ascii() function is implemented using a standard Windows function for character set conversion. Note that the function performs a conversion and not a transcription. This means it replaces each Unicode character with its ASCII equivalent if one exists. A transcription would be what you wanted, i.e. replacing each Unicode character with a sequence of ASCII characters to preserve the meaning of the original. In foobar2000 this is best done using the $replace() function instead of the $ascii() function. For example:
$replace(%artist%,Ä,Ae,ä,ae,Ö,Oe,ö,oe,Ü,Ue,ü,ue,ß,ss)
Not the most polite tone for a first post
... says a german
$replace(%artist%,Ä,Ae,ä,ae,Ö,Oe,ö,oe,Ü,ue,ü,ue,ß,ss)
Small correction, Ü should become Ue:
$replace(%artist%,Ä,Ae,ä,ae,Ö,Oe,ö,oe,Ü,Ue,ü,ue,ß,ss)
Oops, thanks for the correction.