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Convert Codepage

Use Convert Codepage to repair text whose legacy bytes were interpreted with the wrong character encoding. It reinterprets the existing characters as bytes, then decodes those bytes with the selected codepage.

This is useful for a known encoding mistake. It is not a language detector or translation tool. Correct Unicode text can be damaged by applying it again.

Repair one known mistake

  1. Preserve an untouched copy and select one practice file.
  2. Open Actions → Actions (Quick)…, then Convert Codepage.
  3. Set Field to the affected field, such as TITLE.
  4. In Codepage, choose the encoding that the original bytes used.
  5. Choose Apply action and compare with the intended spelling.

For example, the two characters é preserve the UTF-8 bytes for é. Choosing Unicode (UTF-8) converts them back to é. This diagnosis depends on the original byte mistake; choosing a Windows codepage instead would not perform the same repair.

Worked byte-to-text examples

Existing text Codepage Result
é Unicode (UTF-8), 65001 é
Ïðèâåò Cyrillic (Windows-1251), 1251 Привет
Plain ASCII Western European (Windows-1252), 1252 Plain ASCII

The action processes all values of the selected field. It does not change an audio codec, the tag format, or the encoding of a sidecar text file. For reading a text file, use Import Text File instead.

Choose the codepage from evidence

The list offers Windows regional encodings, DOS/OEM pages, East Asian encodings, Mac encodings, ISO-8859 variants, KOI8 and UTF-8:

Family Examples in the list
Windows 1250 Central European, 1251 Cyrillic, 1252 Western European, 1253 Greek, 1254 Turkish, 1255 Hebrew, 1256 Arabic, 1257 Baltic, 1258 Vietnamese, 874 Thai
DOS/OEM 437, 720, 737, 775, 850, 852, 855, 857, 858, 860–866, 869
East Asian 932 Shift-JIS, 936 GBK, 949 Korean, 950 Big5, 54936 GB18030, 51932 EUC-JP
Other 20866 KOI8-R, 21866 KOI8-U, 10000 Mac Roman, 10007 Mac Cyrillic, ISO-8859 variants, 65001 UTF-8

An imported action can retain a codepage identifier outside the normal list; unsupported codepages report an error when run. Do not select an encoding solely because the output happens to look plausible.

Targets and limitations

Use a named field first. _TAG processes every tag field; _ALL also processes the filename stem. _FILENAME keeps the audio extension, and _DIRECTORY changes the containing folder name.

The conversion must recover a byte for every existing character. Values up to U+00FF map to those byte values; certain Windows-1252 glyphs such as € also have a recoverable mapping. Characters with no legacy-byte representation produce an error, as do invalid byte sequences for the chosen codepage. A replacement character � or a previous ? substitution usually means information was already lost; encoding conversion cannot reconstruct it.

Gotchas

  • Do not run the action twice without checking the first result.
  • Whole-library _ALL conversion can damage correct fields and names. Select files with the same confirmed problem first.
  • Keep the original copy. The action writes when run; inspect operation errors and Edit → Undo for recorded changes.