[oeyvind]

Thank you Apple for supporting Chinese (Trad. & Simp.) & Korean now!

Make sure you download the new iTunes 2.0.4 too

More MW Tokyo update: here

[oeyvind]

Some pictures of the new firmwares, here

[aladdinsane]

Step in the right direction - definitely - but not truly international. Still many languages not supported and most notably (for me at least ) is that the iPod is missing 3 Icelandic characters (ðþý). This is silly because the are in Latin 1 and always been. iTunes has similar problem (note: these characters don't show up on the Contacts in iPod either so it is truly missing on the iPod).

Hope Apple fixes this and also for other languages. When they get this right it will always be there in future versions.

Suggestion: They can never support iPod interfaces for all languages. They should add support for resource text files you can drag onto your iPod disk (similar to the new Contacts). Then whoever wants to translate can do so.
When new version of the iPod software is released you have to update your translation. Simple and will make a lot of people happy.

[oeyvind]

I noticed something else too... although now I have more language support than 1.0.4, but the firmware size actually decrease? Noticed that they changed the Japanese font as well from a san serif one to a serif version.

On full international support, they could very well do that with a full Unicode font (with full Unicode table but only 1 size for the iPod screen), i.e. Arial Unicode, Bitstream Cyberbit... just a suggestion of mine (let me know if it sounds silly)

[kennethmac2000]

Originally posted by aladdinsane:
<STRONG>Step in the right direction - definitely - but not truly international. Still many languages not supported and most notably (for me at least ) is that the iPod is missing 3 Icelandic characters (&lt;eth&gt;&lt;thorn&gt;y´). This is silly because the are in Latin 1 and always been. iTunes has similar problem (note: these characters don't show up on the Contacts in iPod either so it is truly missing on the iPod).</STRONG>

The iPod also doesn't support the euro character, a bit of a glaring omission given the euro's position as one of the world's top 3 currencies.

Why don't they just have full Unicode support and be done with it?

[Evangellydonut]

since 1.0.4, iPod have supported those languages. Problem is that unless the Chinese/Korean MP3s are encoded by iTunes, it will not be recognized properly in iTunes or iPod. I encode my mp3 with the LAME encoder in Audion at 320kbps, and all the chinese characters look like alien language in iTunes and iPod.

Also, since I encode the MP3 at cd quality and use a pair of Sony MDR-V6, the most analytical headphones for a reasonable price, I can notice significant distortions with the iPod equalizer, which i'm very unhappy about

Another interesting point...Apple was never big into Chinese support 'til recently, when they released OS9.x in Chinese. I was wondering for the longest time why it just appeared all-of-a-sudden. Then I heard that the new iMacs are manufactured in Mainland China to keep the cost down...which explains a lot of things! ^_^

Originally posted by Evangellydonut:
<STRONG>
Another interesting point...Apple was never big into Chinese support 'til recently, when they released OS9.x in Chinese. I was wondering for the longest time why it just appeared all-of-a-sudden. Then I heard that the new iMacs are manufactured in Mainland China to keep the cost down...which explains a lot of things! ^_^</STRONG>

New iMac was made in Taiwan, by Quanta Computers. They also made PowerBook G4 for Apple.

[aladdinsane]

Originally posted by Evangellydonut:
<STRONG>since 1.0.4, iPod have supported those languages. Problem is that unless the Chinese/Korean MP3s are encoded by iTunes, it will not be recognized properly in iTunes or iPod. I encode my mp3 with the LAME encoder in Audion at 320kbps, and all the chinese characters look like alien language in iTunes and iPod.
</STRONG>

ID3v2 supports both Unicode and Ascii but unfortunatelly due to poor Unicode support in most systems most chinese tags are encoded in Big5 and stored as ASCII. The iPod and iTunes use Unicode and Ascii but no support for other Encodings.

But you're in luck if you are running OS X because the system has excellent support for mapping between encodings. To do the mapping in Cocoa you need to:

1) Read the ID3 tag into NSData object
2) Map the NSData object to NSString using Big5 encoding.
3) Map the NSString to NSData object using Unicode encoding.
4) Write the data to the ID3 Tag as unicode.

I wrote a simple command line tool to do this last week for friend of mine who just got the new 10GB iPod. It worked beautifully on all his files and all the chinese songs where displayed perfectly on his iPod.

The trick is to find id3 library that supports reading and writing unicode tags. I used id3lib (see SourceForge).

To save you time I can send you my program. Just drop me a line. It is not very robust though (since all my friends songs had the same version of id3tags etc). But you can run it on a copy of your songs and see how it works.

The iTunes team needs to add more support for handling tags. The have ISO-&gt;ASCII and back and Reverse Unicode. They should have done better, especially since the OS has excellent support for all kinds of encoding conversion.

If you know AppleScript you can use the iTunes dictionary which allows you to read and write ID3 tags. There are some AppleScript Additions out there for doing Big5 encoding/decodings. I prefered using C (Objective C) for this task because when dealing with encodings you want the data in the purest form as possible.

Good luck.

[aladdinsane]

A little follow up on my message above. The library I used is here: http://id3lib.sourceforge.net/.
I had to do a little tweeking to get it to compile on OS X but nothing serious.

It is a set of C++ classes to manipulate ID3 tags, but to make the use easier it has functions like AddArtist. The implementation uses Unicode internally and most if not all functions takes both char* and unicode_t* strings.

Be aware that if you use the raw classes you better read the ID3v2 RFC.