2008-01-21

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.

15 comments:

  1. thanks, this is great!

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  2. I downloaded the utility but haven't been able to run it - does it need to run within another program?

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  3. It's written in Java, perhaps you don't have it installed?

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  4. HI, I have a bunch of songs on an external hard drive that are tagged in Hebrew lettering & I would like to import them to itunes but it cannot read Hebrew. Can some one please help me? I am using a PC & windows XP.

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  5. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  6. Totach! for the second time this week!

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  7. Amazing program. Thank u very much. Installed, cose my Music folder and converted almost all of the Hebrew music. thanks again.
    Arie

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  8. fantastic. worked for us on our netbook for our hebrew songs in windows xp. Thanks!

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  9. I also have tons of music in hebrew that itunes doesnt recognize. i downloaded the software (its sitting in my applications folder) but i am still unsure what i need to do now for the hebrew to be recognized.. can you try to explain what I need to do to make it recognize my songs? thanks!

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  10. Dose it work also for Mac computers???

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  11. Hello,
    I read the reviews posted here and downloaded the app. I ran it using a single song as a trial and couldn't get the program to change one thing in the displaying of the file.
    What I did was drag the song file into the program, hit convert and than go back to the folder where the song was saved and added that "converted" file into itunes. I repeated this process with all the different encoding methods listed for Hebrew and none had worked.
    Can anybody land a hand here?
    I must be missing something dumb.

    Thank you

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  12. how do you even install the program, there is a bunch of files

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