Понедельник 21 Янв 2008, 12:16

I've noticed that there are different ways to go about this.

عمر دياب (aka Amr Diab) has artist samples on the profile page with Arabic spelling, so I assume that's how it's supposed to be tagged. Virtually every other Arab or Middle Eastern profile page I've seen on last.fm with artist samples is in English, for example; Nancy Ajram, Sherine, or Mostafa Amar.

So it doesn't seem like there's any agreed-upon way to tag Arabic tracks. My computer can read Arabic, but my mp3 player doesn't support non-Roman characters, so I can't read what I'm listening to when I use it, so I am trying to change all my tags to English.

Then the problem with transliteration becomes finding the "right" way to spell the Arabic titles, albums, and artist names. For example, Mostafa Amar is just one of the ways his name could be spelled; in fact, a proper non-shami pronunciation of his name would be "Mostafa Qamar", and his first name could be spelled like "Mustafa" or "Moustafa".

Actually, I don't even think last.fm is a good website to go by, but musicbrainz often doesn't have the information I'm looking for.

I was trying to tag some songs I have by يوري مرقدي, the guy who did that hit song "عربي أنا" but there are two different profile pages set up for the same artist (by different record labels, I guess).

This is kind of frustrating. They need to make media players that support Arabic characters and quit this transliteration nonsense, or failing that, at least agree on a spelling.