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Titles show boxes instead of apostrophes

A track called Can't Stop Loving You shows up as Can□t Stop Loving You, or an accented name arrives full of stray symbols. That is a text encoding mismatch, not damaged audio, and it is usually repairable.

The short answer

Text stored beside music carries no universal label saying how it was written. Older Windows rippers wrote Windows-1252, modern taggers write UTF-8, and read the wrong way round a curly apostrophe turns into a box.

• In a .cue sheet, Vesari Stylus works it out for you as it reads the sheet, and one save from the CUE editor settles it in the file.
• In a file's own tags, the app uses the encoding the tag itself declares, and does not sniff or guess. Where an earlier tool baked the damage into the stored text, you repair it by retyping the field or re-tagging the track.

Nothing here affects playback: a mangled title plays exactly as it always did.

Why a box appears

Windows-1252 puts printable typography in the byte range 0x80 to 0x9F: curly quotes, dashes, the ellipsis. Latin-1, which agrees with it everywhere else, puts invisible control codes in that same range. So a title written by a Western Windows tool and read back as Latin-1 turns the apostrophe in "Can't" into a control character with no glyph, and your screen draws the empty box that stands in for one.

Outside that narrow range the two agree, so the rest of the title looks perfect and only the punctuation is wrong. That signature separates this from a font problem.

CUE sheets are sorted out on read

A .cue is plain text with nothing recording its own encoding, and the two above are the only ones that turn up. When Vesari Stylus reads a sheet it:

• takes it verbatim if the bytes are valid UTF-8, so a modern sheet is untouched;
• otherwise decodes the bytes as Windows-1252, so an older ripper's curly apostrophe arrives as an apostrophe;
• repairs album and track titles and artists that an earlier tool already scrambled, by reading those stray control codes back through the Windows-1252 table. The five byte values Windows-1252 leaves undefined are left alone rather than invented, so a rare box survives.

To settle it in the file:

1. Right-click a single CUE track and choose Edit CUE Tags.
2. Check the text in the Edit CUE sheet window and correct anything still wrong.
3. Press Save .cue.

The sheet is written back as UTF-8, so it reads the same way everywhere from then on. The line naming the audio file is treated more cautiously than the titles, because a wrong guess there loses every track on the sheet. Single-file albums and CUE sheets covers what to check when a whole album goes missing.

Tags: what is read, and what cannot be recovered

An ID3 tag records which encoding each text field uses, and the app follows what the field declares, whether that is Latin-1, UTF-16 or UTF-8. There is no character-set detection anywhere in the tag reading path, and the Windows-1252 repair above is applied to CUE sheets only. A field whose bytes were mislabelled before they reached you therefore stays as stored, reproduced faithfully rather than rewritten on a hunch.

There is one legacy tag fault it does repair. Some older taggers wrote UTF-16 strings without the mark saying which byte order they use, and a single missing mark aborts the entire tag read, so the file looks untagged: blank artist and album, plus tag and artwork saves that fail. Vesari Stylus inserts the missing mark in memory when it reads such a file, and writes the corrected tag back to disk the first time you save tags or artwork. The audio bytes are preserved exactly. Where the byte order cannot be told from the bytes, the string is left alone.

Repairing a mangled tag

• Retype it. Open the Tag Editor, select the track, fix the field and press Save. For MP3, WAV and WAVE files the app writes an ID3v2.4 tag, whose text goes in as UTF-8. See The tag editor.
• Re-tag it. Run Super-Tag to identify the track and bring clean metadata in over the top. See Super-Tag.
• Fix it elsewhere. After repairing files with an outside tool, run Rescan Library on the Tools tab. A rescan skips any file whose size and modified time both still match what it recorded, so a tool that leaves both untouched leaves the old text in place. See How scanning works.

When it is the font, not the text

One box where an apostrophe belongs is an encoding problem. A long run of identical boxes, in a script such as Japanese, Korean or Arabic, usually is not. Vesari Stylus asks for the Inter typeface and falls back to your system font, and bundles no fonts of its own, so what can be drawn depends on what is installed on your PC. Adding Windows language support for that script fills those gaps in, and re-tagging will not.

Still wrong?

If a title is still mangled after a re-save and a rescan, use Report a Bug in Settings, quoting the text you see alongside what it should say. Is this a bug? How to report it explains what that sends.

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