Fixing Russian track names in iTunes

Here’s a situation: you have a bunch of MP3s of Russian (or Cyrillic in general) songs that you decided to drag-and-drop add to your iTunes library. No problem with that, except every once in awhile you end up with songs/artists/albums named using “birds language” instead of proper Cyrillic letters.

I have once in the past stumbled onto a small AppleScript solution that fixed that, but I was unable to trace it down again. I have, therefore, decided to “scratch this particular itch” and build one myself.

Here’s a fruit of that labor.

A few caveats:

  • It worked on a sample of songs I had, can’t promise it would work always.
  • At this point it only fixes Russian letters, not Cyrillic ones at large.
  • The change is irreversible: you cannot undo the action!

15 thoughts on “Fixing Russian track names in iTunes”

  1. Hi, I was hoping to use your script until I read that it does not work on Intel Macs.<BR/><BR/>I am trying to port iTunes from Windows to Mac and, exactly as you described, some of the Russian tags come broken.<BR/><BR/>I was wondering 1) why some tags and not all are broken, and 2) if there is a way to better prepare the library in Windows iTunes prior to porting (i.e., convert encoding from

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  2. The issue with Intel Mac is mentioned in the bug tracker — Intel and PPC are using different byte order. I’ve had some rough sketches of how things should be done on an Intel Mac, they sortof work, but not 100%.<BR/><BR/>I can pass these over to you to check, but I’m getting the feeling that doing a "universal" version in AppleScript might be a bit challenging…

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  3. Are you using FireFly or similar to serve content to iTunes clients? In this case — no. Script requires access to iTunes database via iTunes AppleScript objects.<br /><br />If you have a set of MP3 files that you need to correct, I can give you a Ruby script + some instructions on its usage that does a trick.

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