This is a song metadata i have (on Winamp):
I'm trying to figure which artist it really is. Tried googling/google translate, but couldn't find the artist/title in english. Although, one page showed the name "Wagner" in there, but I listened many of his songs but didn't find it.
How can I decode it into readable format; in that language it was written in (using unicode perhaps?), so i can use google translate to translate it? Or do i actually need to know the language before doing so?.
This is caused by character encoding mismatch, which is fairly common when legacy 8-bit encodings are used. A broken tagger marked the ID3 tag as being ISO-8859-1, but actually encoded the text in Windows-1251 (which ID3v2 does not allow). Your player doesn't know about it and thinks that the text is in ISO-8859-1. Or maybe worse; it also ignores the ID3 spec and thinks the tag is in Windows-1252 or whatever your local encoding is. Wikipedia calls this mojibake.
(It's impossible for a program to reliably differentiate between the 8-bit Windows-125x or ISO-8859-x encodings other than by making statistical guesses based on letter frequencies as the Universal Decoder does, so the encoding has to be specified explicitly. The ID3v1 specification only allowed ISO-8859-1, but nobody cared about it. ID3v2 allows ISO-8859-1, UTF-8, and UTF-16, with the encoding being specified in the tag itself. Unfortunately, not all players have started caring.)
The Universal Cyrillic Decoder might help; it decodes "Artist" to Евгений Мравинский.
If the page doesn't work, try this tool or find a Linux box that has iconv:
echo "garbage" | iconv -t Windows-1252 | iconv -f Windows-1251
(Hopefully, Winamp will know better and store the fixed tags in Unicode...)
Do not use ID3 version 1 when tagging music, to (mostly) avoid such problems.
