how to unicode commentting a mp3 using LAME encoder

Question

I want to add some comments to my mp3s but my comments all are in non-latin characters like arabic. I have written a shell program to get the comments from user in windows but since LAME.exe is a console program I don't know how to convert these non-latin character to something meaningful for LAME. so is there any way to add these kind of comments using LAME.exe?

regards.

Answer 1

I think you're going to have real trouble doing it on the Windows command line, as everything will be working in the system default code page (ANSI) and not Unicode. You won't be able to use Arabic at all unless you're on an Arabic Windows install (ANSI=code page 1256; settable in the region options), and even then I'm not sure it'll actually use the right encoding.

In any case lame.exe is not a good choice for editing tags, as it's an audio encoder, which will decode and re-encode the MP3, causing quality loss.

There are many graphical apps that will batch re-tag MP3s. If you want a scriptable solution you're probably better off with a higher-level language/library that supports Unicode better than the Windows command line/bat files (eg Python + Mutagen, but there are many possibilities depending on what languages you're familiar with).