iTunes on the Mac and Hebrew

Hebrew, It works, bitches. Apparently all the rumors were just another case of FUD.

I'm of recent the owner of a brand new Mac mini 2.0 Ghz, but more on that later. The thing is, I've decided to give a chance to the iLife and iTunes other iBuzzword products.
The moment I imported my library to iTunes, I've noticed it cannot read my Hebrew song names from the ID3 tags. I assumed that according to what I've heard before, the Hebrew support on the Mac is not so good, so I left it as it was. Later on, when browsing through the library, I saw some of the names in Hebrew. Hmm. *Ding*.

Apparently, iTunes works great with Unicode, but not with the Windows Hebrew Codepage, also known as CP1255. It even provides a built-in feature to convert from ASCII in the ISO-Latin1 codepage (and only it), to Unicode. After wandering around the Interweb, I found a nice little utility (aptly named "Unicode Rewriter") that does just that - almost automagically. Choose a source codepage, and you're done. In 15 minutes, I converted all of the songs to Unicode with the click of many buttons and a bit of dragging & dropping. It might even work in Windows, I didn't try it.

Now all I'm left with is the endless task of importing and organizing all of my music.