#998212 easytag: overwrites tags containing UTF8 data with random rubbish

Package:
easytag
Source:
easytag
Description:
GTK+ editor for audio file tags
Submitter:
Norbert Preining
Date:
2021-12-13 01:36:02 UTC
Severity:
important
Tags:
#998212#5
Date:
2021-11-01 04:58:06 UTC
From:
To:
Hi

it seems easytag has not arrived in the 20th century, since today it
deleted all tags of 3 CD releases containing compilations of Japanese
singers on my disk. All information that contained UTF8 code has been
destroyed. Easytag complained about "Cannot recode blabla to latin1"
(not surprising, it is utf8) and happily destroyed the complete tags
saving rubbish information.

I suggest removing this program from Debian since this is a serious data
loss issue.

Thanks

Norbert
#998212#10
Date:
2021-11-01 09:00:11 UTC
From:
To:
Control: tags -1 moreinfo

What kind of files / tags did you process with easytag? If these files
were mp3 files with ID3 tags before version 2 than the program that
produced is buggy and not easytag

Cheers
#998212#17
Date:
2021-11-01 23:46:41 UTC
From:
To:
Hi

that were mp3, not sure about what version of tags since they were gone
afterwards. At least they displayed fine in all music players I used.
But yes, I guess it is common here in Japan that id3v1 tags are coded in
UTF8 (or even ShiftJIS).

I still consider overwriting tags when there was an error during
preparation, irrespective of the correctness of the original tags,
a serious problem. easytag should *not* write broken tags.

Best

Norbert
#998212#22
Date:
2021-11-29 10:18:11 UTC
From:
To:
It would be good to know what the tags were before, and what they are now.

What does "file" say about the affected files?

It is possible you have both latin1 id3v1 and Unicode id3v2 tags,
and your player displays the id3v1 tag.

Define "broken".

When writing both id3v1 and id3v2, it is common that some characters
cannot be properly written in the id3v1 tag.

Existing tags in ShiftJIS would be broken since this is not a valid
encoding for these tags in any case.

The situation around tags is a huge mess.

EasyTAG defaults to writing id3v2.3 and not id3v2.4 for reasons like
Windows Media Player only learning in 2017 how to handle about id3v2.4
that was published in the year 2000.

And then there are plenty of hardware mp3 players of different age and
bugginess in use.

One might want to write both an id3v1 tag for compatibility with old
players in latin1, and an id3v2 tag in Unicode for newer players. And
then some player that supports both prefers the id3v1 tag.

The preferences of EasyTAG give quite a lot of control over what to
write and how to handle errors, including how to read and write broken
tags. Most likely the default settings are not a good fit for whatever
was in the files you had.

cu
Adrian