After discovering that unicode MP3 tags confuse my Alltel Hue cell phone's music player, I of course needed to fix the broken files. But I didn't want to figure out which they were by trial and error - we have a big music collection!

I cobbled together some code that I had sitting around, and created a little command-line utility that checks mp3 files to see if the tags are unicode.

If you found this post because you're looking for a solution to the same problem, you might find this useful. It requires .NET 2.0. Use the command-line argument -h for instuctions.

Download MP3Checker.zip

One of the cool features of the Alltel Hue phone that Katrin and I have is the built-in music player. I recently started using this and found that some of my mp3 files show gibberish for the album and song information.

After a little research I figured out the source of the problem; the problem files have their tags stored in unicode. The phone can't understand this and shows the wrong  characters.

There are a lot of tools out there for manipulating mp3 tags, but the one I've found that can fix this issue is Mp3tag. I don't have to reload the tag information; just set the appropriate options in the software, open a folder full of music files, and choose the save option from the file menu. The 16-bit tags are overwritten with 8-bit information and the phone can now understand them.

Update: I wrote a little console application to check which files have unicode tags.