I have a lot of Japanese anime songs, JPop, JRock, and Canto Pop in my music collection. For a long time I’ve been annoyed by the fact that iTunes on my Windows XP box would only display the titles of Chinese and Japanese songs with those little boxes that mean it didn’t know wtf to do with it. After much googling to no avail and a fruitless search of the iTunes site, I stumbled upon the answer while installing a Japanese game. The game required the installation of support for East Asian character sets. Once I did this, the Japanese and Chinese song titles, etc., displayed correctly! Here is the procedure.
- Open the Start menu and click Control Panel
- In the Control Panel, switch to Classic View if you aren’t already in it. Then open Regional and Language Options.
- Click on the Languages tab and then click the empty check box next to Install files for East Asian languages.
- Click Apply. Now at this point or just after you click the check box, a message box will come up and tell you that installing the support will take about 230MB and you will also need to have your Windows XP installation CD handy.
- Just follow the installation instructions, and at the end of it all, you’re good to go!
12 replies on “East Asian Character Sets In iTunes For Windows”
thanks
You’re welcome!
Hi,
I did exactly that but the characters are still not displayed correctly in my itunes. I now have question marks in lieu of those boxes and I can’t say I prefer them over the boxes. Do you have any clue what might have gone wrong? Cheers
Hmmm. The first thing I’d try would be rebooting the computer and if the question marks remain, try reinstalling iTunes. If that doesn’t fix it then I’d try repeating the installation of East Asian Languages support. Oh, and, as usual, make sure that Windows has all of the latest patches.
Hello. I’ve already had East Asian languages installed, as I type in Japanese and visit Japanese sites frequently. However, iTunes interprets all of my Asian characters as “gibberish” one could say. You probably aren’t understanding what I mean by that, because it doesn’t make much sense anyways. Here’s what some of my Japaense titled songs look like in iTunes:
Dunno what to do at all. Any help would be appreciated.
Assuming that you’re running on English Windows you might want to try reinstalling the East Asian language support and/or iTunes. However, if you’re actually running a Japanese version of Windows (I only ask because you mentioned typing in Japanese as well), then you may need to install the Japanese version of iTunes. I don’t know anything about the non English versions of iTunes, so you should check with someone more experienced before attempting this, if that is the case.
thanks for the instructions. i have a question. what if i don’t have the installation CD? i dunno where it is. is it possible to download the support patch?
I think the installation CD is essential. If you don’t have it handy, perhaps you can borrow one from a friend. Alternatively, I would check Microsoft’s web site, but I’ve never heard of this being available as a download.
Thanks! Now I can actually distinguish between songs. 😀
Thank you for the post. This is exactly what I was looking for.
Thank you so much for your help. I was having the same problem but could’nt find help anywhere. But now I have another issue: Microsoft says this option of downloading East Asian languages is only possible if your version of Windows supports MUIs (so only for Windows 7 Ultimate or Enterprise)!!! And i only have a regular version!! im going CRAZZZYY!!! do you have any idea how to deal with this? (otherwise, im doomed (;O__o)
@aoichan Sorry, but I haven’t tried this on Windows 7 at all since I mostly work in Mac OS X these days. I’ve got Windows 7 Ultimate in Boot Camp for running certain games and some Windows development. I’ll see what I can find out.