The song name, artist, and album tags in many music files (whether they are acquired legally or otherwise) from Chinese and Korean sources are completely garbled in iTunes on a Macintosh. I assume this is because iTunes assumes that the text is one encoding (Unicode or MacRoman?) and they were in fact encoded in another (often EUC_KR for Korean, Big5 for Taiwanese files, GB for files with simplified Chinese characters). I used to frequently get this problem with Japanese music files but for some reason (perhaps because Unicode is more popular in Japan?) this has gradually become less of a problem.
Fixing these tags can be a pain and some of the older tools such as once awesome “MP3 Rage” and “ID3 Editor” often make things worse due to their inconsistent handling of 2-byte non-Roman languages.
An Apple Support page, however, recently pointed me to a great shareware application ($12) called ID3Mod2 which looks like it is made by the same people that made the incredible Chinese input method QIM that I talked about in an earlier posting (I don’t know this developer personally so it is not as if I’m trying to find good things to say about their work). You can freely use the software for a number of days, during which I was able to go through and fix all of the garbled tags in music files I have collected in China, Korea, and Japan over the last decade. Amazing – I might now actually learn the names of some of the songs I have been listening to for so long and someday even gather the courage to request them on a future karaoke adventure.
Easier way is OSX
Open itunes after changing your OS language to the language of the song (if song is Korean, go to system preferences, language, Korean) logout and log back in… Then in that language, in itunes, change the ID3 tag to 2.4
Change language back to english, log back in, viola!
You are my music saving grace, thank you so much for saving me so much time and utterly inefficient work.