I have used CopyTrans Manager for years and have found their technical support to be responsive and excellent.

tanstaafl.

Still struggling with this, as Peter advised it's characters, e.g.

Accented letters
Non standard punctuation marks (just found a strange long dash along with the quote mark Peter identified)
Some standard punctuation marks, I know semi colon is an issue

Is there a utility I can use to strip out these? I guess if I knew them all then I could do it EditPad but seeing as I don't...

p.s. Happy New Year, hope everyone's well

I just went through something similar, or at least related to your problem. I had an eBook that would not display properly on my Kindle due to weird punctuation problems, the most prominent being that every single-quote mark displayed as single-quote followed by a space. That meant every contraction showed as "can' t" instead of "can't", and sometimes the " t" would show up on a new line..

The odd thing was, when I converted the .mobi file to Microsoft Word, the problem was not there. It was only when I changed the .mobi file to plain text that I could see what was happening. Every single-quote, every double-quote was in non-ascii form that Word could deal with in a .docx file, but my Kindle could not. I'm guessing it had something to do with Unicode rather than ascii formatting.

I edited the text file in Word as a text file and after more than 6,000 global search and replaces was able to get a file I could change back to .mobi that the Kindle was happy with. Not perfect, by any means, but readable.

Interestingly, the book was #1 of a four-book series, and the other three (at first glance, anyway) seem to be OK.

It's not likely that my experience will be of much use to you, except maybe if you can create some sort of .txt file from your list of music, the weird characters will show up much more plainly and can be fixed with MS-Word.

tanstaafl.

Back in the old days, I used to use MP3TagStudio to do things like that. http://www.magnusbrading.com/mp3ts/

Looks like it hasn't been updated in quite some time, but it might still work for you.

Magnus stopped supporting mp3TagStudio about 10 years ago, and unless you currently have a working copy of it, or have files from an old copy tucked away in a backup hiding in some dusty corner, you will be out of luck because even if you do find the setup files, it won't run without a valid mp3ts.rg file that contains the registration code.

It just so happens that I do have all the necessary files to install and run mp3TagStudio, and instructions I wrote to myself on how to get it going again. PM me if you are interested...

And yes, I still use mp3TagStudio to manage my audio library tags. I've glanced at more modern, more capable programs, but they're different from what I'm used to, so they can't be any good!

tanstaafl.

At one time, I did have all of those things, but that was many computers ago, and I'm sure the mp3ts.rg file is long lost to the annals of time.

Once I had my library of mp3 files all tagged the way I wanted them, I just didn't need the batch processing capabilities that it offered and kinda stopped using it somewhere along the way.

MP3TS is one of the few "old Windows programs" that I can't live without. Though my Mac is my daily driver, I still keep a Windows laptop, and a Windows VM on the Mac, for just these situations.

I have 20,610 audio files in my computer that have been treated with MP3TS, which includes about 3600 audio books. Oh, wait, each of those audio books is split into, on average, 10 files. That runs my total up over 53,000 MP3TS tags in my library. It would have been a long, tough road without Magnus Brading!

To the best of my knowledge, every one of those tags is exactly the same format, like this:

tanstaafl.

Some of those old programmes were absolutely brilliant. I used to use Audiograbber to rip my CDs and MP3Manager developed in FoxBase by a guy called Petr for tagging etc. MediaMonkey etc are much more capable but nowhere near as easy to use.

I really need to figure out RegEx, I'm pretty sure it's doable in that.