Java Id3 Unicode Rewriter

I have many MP3 files which were ripped under Traditional Chinese version of Windows. The ID3 tags are encoding using Big5. As I am also a Mac OS X user, I use iTunes to listen to the MP3 files. Unfortunately, iTunes is unable to understand Big5 encoding. It only accepts Unicode. After a little research in the Internet, I found that Chinese Rewriter can solve my problem. Chinese Rewriter can convert ID3 tags of every MP3 file from Big5 to Unicode. Only one at a time. There is no way to convert a batch of MP3 files with a few mouse clicks. As I do not have much knowledge in ID3 tags, I looked for other software to solve my problem, Incidentialy I found ID3iconv which works find for me. Since ID3iconv is a command line tool, it would make my life easier if there is a graphical user interface (GUI) for it. Unicode Rewriter is thus born.

Features

• Unicode Rewriter inherits features from ID3iconv. Below is adapted from the descriptions of ID3iconv.
• Unicode Rewrite is a Java tool to convert ID3 tags in MP3 files from whatever machine encoding you have (GB2312/GBK for Chinese, etc) to Unicode. It converts both ID3v1 tags and ID3v2 tags to Unicode-encoded ID3v2 (v2.3 or v2.4). This is sometimes useful because,
•     ID3v1 or v2 don't really supports multi-byte encoding such as GBK or Big5. Most existing files falsely pretend they are ISO-8859-1 encoded. This means the software handles them in all kinds of weird ways.
•     Even if the user can force the encoding in some players, it is then impossible to display tags of several international languages at the same time if files are so encoded.

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Unicode Rewriter takes all text fields of ID3 tags and assumes they are in a certain encoding. It then converts them to their Unicode equivalence as supported by ID3 v2.3. If originally the file has only v1 tag, a v2 tag will be added to the beginning of the file. If original the file has a non-Unicode v2 tag, it will be converted to Unicode format. The output encoding is Unicode little endian, which seems to be the most compatible.

Whatever the encoding is supp orted by the Java virtual machine, the encoding is supported. Please see Supported Encoding for the list of supported encoding.

After the conversion, the MP3 files can be handled by:

•     Rhythmbox 0.6.5. Gnome's default music player.
•     iTunes for Mac OS and Windows.
•     Windows explorer's file property dialog for MP3 files.