Thanks for the thoughts! I did try other media players in Maemo, and the ones I tried so far were in fact able to read the ID3 tags correctly.

Regarding encoding, that has always been a problem for me in the past. I may need to check that again, as I can't remember what encoding it was set to (I just know that since I recently moved to Windows 7, I hadn't set my system's non-unicode locale to a Chinese one - so I'm not sure how that interacts with the software I'm using to tag). I know I wrote the tags to use UTF-8 though.

The odd thing, however, is that it's not an entire set of MP3s that are missing. For example, I have an album, and I wrote the tags for those MP3s all at the same time using the same software. But then on the phone, some of those MP3s are missing, while some aren't.

I have one other theory that I need to test in greater detail tonight when I get back home... but essentially the last thing I tried was taking one of the offending MP3s and replacing the Chinese ID3 tags with just plain ASCII names. I renamed the file to also only have ASCII characters. Surprisingly, when I put it back into the media player, that file's tags were still not read!

I'm now thinking that it's no longer an issue with the ID3 tags exclusively. Rather, some part of the file container itself is corrupted or written in a way that Media Player doesn't like. To further test this theory, I took the offending MP3 file and passed it through ffmpeg using the -acodec copy option (essentially, I was trying to just strip the MP3 data out of the container and rewrite it again). I then put back the ASCII ID3 tags and put the file onto the phone.

After doing that, Media Player picked up the ID3 tags just fine.

So it seems that either a portion of the file is corrupted that causes the tracker indexer to fail, or, it's just written in some way that causes problems with this software.

My next step is to try to put the proper Chinese ID3 tags and album art back in... and if that works, I'll run all the offending files through ffmpeg.

Hopefully that'll work - I'll see!