Monday May 19
 
19:06
 
Moving iTunes From PC To Mac – Corrupt Tags

Moving my iTunes library from Windows to Mac OS X seemed easy at first. I followed the instructions from Apple, using a USB HDD instead of the iPod, and everything appeared to be lovely.

Then I noticed two problems..

Firstly, even though the artwork folder was copied in the move, a lot of my album art disappeared. It seemed to affect the artwork that had been downloaded from the iTunes store only, not the artwork embedded in MP3 files, so I ended up removing the artwork folder from Music/iTunes completely and telling iTunes to redownload all the artwork. Problem solved.

Second was far more difficult to solve: I use English in Macos X. My Korean music seemed to copy over fine, but when I played them, the Korean artist name and song name became garbled. This didn’t affect all songs – it seemed random. Since I have hundreds of Korean songs, playing each to find out which ones have problems, and then correcting the tags was not an option.

It took me a long time and much experimentation and recopying over my iTunes library to find a solution. No one solution I found on the net worked, but eventually I found a combination that did:

Fix garbage tags for Korean songs in iTunes.

1. Copy over the iTunes Library as per Apple’s instructions. Then make a copy of your iTunes folder, so that you have a backup.
2. Quit iTunes.
3. Go to System Preferences – International and change the language for menus to be Korean.
4. Restart iTunes. The menus should be in Korean,
5. Select all the Korean songs, then right click and choose the ID3 menu item.
6. Select the option which says ASCII to Latin (the second option). Note: If you accidently apply this twice (eg, you try it once on a few songs, it works OK so apply it to all), you can choose Latin to ASCII to reverse the second application.
7. Once finished, the tags should be in Korean. Quit iTunes, then change the language back to English in International.
8. Reboot. This may not be necessary, but while 1-7 alone seemed to fix things, they broke again after reboot, so don’t skip the reboot.
9. Open iTunes, select all the converted songs without playing any, right click and convert the tags to v2.4.
10. Finished!

I assume the same method would work for Japanese, Chinese, Thai, etc tags also.

The problem seems to stem from when a non-Unicode encoding, eg EUC KR, is used in tags. After the tags are correct, converting them to v2.4 keeps them correct – so presumably that updates the encoding to be Unicode.

For the moment, everything seems to be running smoothly. iTunes definitely behaves better on the Mac than the PC, handling my 80GB library with ease. On the PC is it a resource hog.