Why is the metadata of some MP3 on import truncated

Help
1

I have some MP3s where the metadata is truncated on the first “umlaut” (German letters like ä or ü).

I have uploaded an example MP3 file here. When I import this into beets via beet -A tillmann_pruefer.mp3 I end up with a entry in beets’ database like this:

            album: DIE ZEIT
     albumartists: 
              art: False
           artist: Von Tillmann Pr
          artists: 
         bitdepth: 0
          bitrate: 96000
         channels: 1
             date: 2021-01-01
           format: MP3
            genre: Speech
           genres: Speech
           length: 235.47841666666667
mb_albumartistids: 
     mb_artistids: 
       samplerate: 44100
            title: Stell dir vor, ich w
             year: 2021

Note, the artist is “Von Tillmann Pr”, but it should be "Von Tillmann Prüfer". Same problem with the title: It reads “Stell dir vor, ich w”, but it should be “Stell dir vor, ich würde Oktoba heißen”.

I have other tracks from other sources, which contain “umlaute” and import fine.

Any idea why this doesn’t work here and how I can fix it?

2

Hello! I have confirmed for this file that Mutagen only sees the truncated title:

$ python3 -c 'import mutagen; print(mutagen.File("tillmann_pruefer.mp3")["TIT2"])'   
Stell dir vor, ich w

Do you have another tool that shows the complete title? If so, there may be a bug in Mutagen. But it may also be that the other tool is behaving outside of the ID3 specification.

3

I have to admit other (comamdn line ) tool give the same result.

But it is odd that it always happens on the umlaute… I was thinking it might be an encoding issue…

4

Maybe it’s worth looking at the origin of the files? Maybe the data was truncated before the files were even generated?

5

Yep, will look into it.

The files come from a German subscription news site, so I don’t have much control over them. I will contact the news site… but don’t expect any meaningful response. :frowning: