Regarding the possibility of Japanese support on the horizon

I'm posting this here, as Rob S. asked that we keep the "Bugs In V3 A10" thread clean.

First, let me say I am just about peeing myself with joy. This would (to an extent) open up about a third of my music collection to use on the empeg. Amazing, and let me be the first to say a hearty "Thank you!" to the guys for this.

If Japanese support happens, I'll put up a poll as to how the reward gets used. If people vote for charity, then to charity it will go!

The reward was $350, but I'm gonna just say $360, and here's why:

Discussion sounds like only the "title" will be capable of Japanese. That's worth $120. Partial support, partial reward. If we get this...



...then it's worth $360.

Either way, I want the developers to decide where the money goes. That just seems right to me. After all, the reward is for providing Japanese support. If they want it to go to charity, then that is, in my mind, how they're using their reward.

EDIT: Ooops. It's "title" that would allow Japanese, from what I understand, not "artist".

TonyC, can emphatic do all-big-font displays? Would it be able to use the Japanese fonts?

A Hamasaki fan, I see. Heh.
I think it's awesome that Japanese support is coming. I've been tagging my songs in romaji due to the empeg, and now I'll be able to switch to the real deal. Nice.

Yeah, quite the fan (as embarassing as it may be). I think I have everything she's put out (singles and all) except for the new "Fairyland" EP.

I thought about retagging all my Japanese stuff into romaji, but I ran into three problems:

1) Romaji is not only offensive in principle, but I also have to stop and think what it says. There isn't the instant recognition of kanji / kana.

2) Everything else I own that's MP3 related does kanji / kana without a problem, and I don't want to have two copies of everything.

3) No way am I retagging 20,000+ Japanese MP3s, just to end up with a romaji nightmare and even worse storage dilemmas.

I just appreciate (more than I can say) the previous addition of Russian support in V3. I was able to put a ton of music on that I haven't listened to in the car forever. And the Russian font looks pretty damn nice, too. A friend of mine is a former Russian interpretor (U.S. navy), and when he was in the car the other day, a Del'fin song came on. When my buddy saw the Russian on the display he almost plotzed.

What are you using to rip and tag CDs with kanji titles?
I use EAC, but it doesn't support wide input, so I end up having to tag things after the fact.
Is there something slicker for Windows I should know about?

Too bad there's no way to include multiple text information frames in an ID3 tag with markers indicating locale informtaion. That would have been helpful for you.

Sadly, no. I usually just rip Japanese stuff as "Track 1.mp3, Track 2.mp3..." then tag by hand. In fact, I don't think there's an MP3 in my entire collection (70,000+) that I haven't modified the tags on manually. I'm REALLY anal-retentive about having my music tagged properly.

For multi-language tagging, nothing I've tried works better than MP3BookHelper. I handle Unicode beautifully, and its regular expression support is phenominal.

Quote:
Too bad there's no way to include multiple text information frames in an ID3 tag with markers indicating locale informtaion. That would have been helpful for you.

My thoughts exactly, Bitt. It would have been great if I could just use ID3v1 for romaji tags, but keep the v2 tags in kanji / kana, and use an entry in the "Comment" tag to alert the software. In fact, I've long wondered if it were possible to have the empeg check the comment field, and if it says (for instance) "Japanese", then the player would switch the info mode to an alternate which only shows the artist name, the album, and the song title, leaving enough room for Japanese characters. If the next MP3 was not tagged as "Japanese" in the "Comment" tag, the player would switch back to the previous info mode.

But either way, I'm thrilled at the thought of any Japanese support! THe empeg guys are my heros.