Digital music forum: ID3 tag editing, strange characters appear for artist

Can you recommend a good FREE tag editor? And I noticed that this is a relatively recently occurring thing, didn't used to happen. Could it have been introduced say with SP3?

We only have a few working XP machines left for production testing and when I see this it usually is the same in the tag editor. Digging deeper I find the user had downloaded from somewhere and the mystery is over.

There are some rippers and files that have odd tag fields with non-standard formats that will trigger this issue. No fix will ever be seen for reasons I'm sure we don't have to discuss.

I apologize but why didn't you use google or download.com to look for another editor?
Bob

First you tell me to try a tag editor, then you tell me that when you see this it is usually the same in the tag editor. So why bother using a tag editor if it won't fix the problem? And the reason I didn't simply google it was because I figured that if you were recommending I try a tag editor, you must have significant enough experience with these things to be able to share the one that YOU prefer. That is the whole point of asking someone for a specific recommendation. Of course I can google it and spend the entire day trying 20 different ones at random.

Most tag editors will auto fix those badly formatted tag areas.

Good to know you can try a few editors but I hear you. For me I rarely edit tags but when I do, it's with iTunes. Some folk bristle at that software but I can't tell why. Maybe it's Apple, maybe they had an issue but here it is flawless.

My specific recommendation is to check download.com and try the top five folk like. Just like iTunes you may hate what I choose.
Bob

Thanks. If anyone else is following this, I seem to be doing ok with Mp3 Tag Tools. Will probably stop here.

I noticed in using Mp3 Tag Tools that there was no strange character in the id3v1.1 field, so it was a quick fix simply to batch-copy the id3v1.1 fields to the id3v2.x fields and now the artist fields display correctly in Windows.