Inputting Foreign Characters

[birdienumnums]

I have a lot of CDs that have titles in Japanese or Chinese. Is there a way that I can input those titles using the correct characters?

I have already set up my Orange CD to display Japanese characters, but unless it finds the CD on Amazon, I'm unable to input the characters myself. Even Freedb isn't very helpful because you can't search using foreign characters. I need to know the correct code.

Whenever I try to input Japanese titles I get "? ? ? ? ? ?" ... which isn't very helpful, now is it?

:)

Is there a website or a tool that you know of that will convert Japanese to the code that Orange CD recognizes?
I need the code to look like this: "

[birdienumnums]

I'd still like to find an easier way to do it, but I have found a solution that I figured I would post here in reply to my own question, in case someone else wants to know!
I wracked my brain and came up with this... and nobody could have been more surprised than me when it actually worked, LOL!

Freedb will actually get the correct Japanese titles when you access it on-line with an MP3 ripper program. The titles all look like question marks in Orange CD Suite, but they are displayed properly via dbPoweramp, windows Media Player, iTunes etc...

..SO...

I ripped the CDs to MP3 and left the Japanese characters in the ID Tags. Then I used Orange CD Suite to add the MP3s to my database and VOILA! It recognized the Japanese characters in the correct code.

I didn't want my database to contain any MP3s though, only CDs, so I used the information that was created and saved it to a text document (one line at a time).

I copied all crazy looking code from the tag info into a text document, then deleted the MP3 albums that Orange CD Suite had scanned.

Finally, I scanned my CDs again, and replaced the question marks that freedb gave me with the information I had saved in the text document; correctly tagging my CDs to display the Japanese characters for all the tracks!

It sounds complicated, but it only took about 2 minutes for each CD, and there were only 3 of them that I was having trouble with at the moment!

Hope it helps... although if anyone else has a quicker solution I would appreciate it! I still have a bunch of CDs that I'm afraid I might have to do this for, LOL!

[davidagbr]

I'm not 100% sure that I've fully understood you. But, could you not after scanning the mp3 files, open the album properties. Under the misc tab, remove the album path, then change the album icon to Cd (or whatever)?

Then you wouldn't have to scan your mp3s again?

Alternatively, scan the mp3, then scan your cd. Highlight the the MP3, go to the tools tab, click copy fields, then paste fields onto the CD.. that should avoild cutting and pasting all the fiddly bits!

Just ideas,

David