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Saturday, November 7, 2009

Trick to let iTune handle Chinese song names and tags correctly in Mac OS X

When play Chinese songs in iTune, it always tends to show the song information, such as name, artist, album, etc. as garbage text.

When I was running Mac OSX Tiger and Leopard, the trick I used was to open iTune application information by right-click and choose Get Info.
In the information windows, remove all languages except Chinese. So next time, when iTune is started, it starts in Chinese mode. And it handles all Chinese songs correctly.

In Snow Leopard, the language selection is missing in Get Info dialog. It took me a few weeks to find the new trick.
cd /Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/Resources
mkdir lang_bak
mv *.lproj lang_bak
cp -r lang_bak/zh_CN.lproj .

Then start iTune, you will get it in Chinese mode again and just as the trick before, all Chinese songs are handled correctly.

Hope these tricks can be helpful to Chinese Mac users.

Enjoy!

BTW: If you speak other language and suffers the sames kind of problem, I guess you can try to delete all other languages other than your preference. Hopefully that will work for you too.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Hi, can you help me with this problem? I am using mac os lion now but the don't get ur method


how to get to...
cd /Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/Resources
mkdir lang_bak
mv *.lproj lang_bak
cp -r lang_bak/zh_CN.lproj .

could you pm me at cklimroger@yahoo.com.sg

Thanks a million