title: Windows Text Encoding Question
body: <p>I'm trying to read meta data from a music (m4a) file. I have successfully figured out how to navigate around the file to get to the meta data. Documentation on the file format is hard to come by but what I have found claims that the encoding of the meta data is UTF-8.</p>
  
  <p>Here’s my problem that I have been pulling my hair out with. I’m using Visual Basic 2008 to access and read data from the file. I access the file using the BinaryStreamReader methods. But cannot find an encoding setting that will handle the meta data tags AND the meta data itself. Following is a hex string of a sample of the data I’m working with.</p>
  
  <p>00 00 00 21   A9 6E 61 6D   00 00 00 19   64 61 74 61    00 00 00 01    00 00 00 47   6C C3 B3 73   C3 B3 6C 69</p>
  
  <p>The last 9 bytes being the name of a track called Glósóli – so definitely UTF-8.  If I set encoding to UTF-8 I can retrieve and display this value correctly. However the 4 character meta tag name A9 6E 61 6D  is retrieved as “square box”nam instead of ©nam  If I change the encoding to Windows-1252 I get ©nam correctly but the track name is gibberish !!
  Can you please explain to me why the UTF-8 encoding is not recognizing  the 0xA9 byte correctly?
  I have also noticed that looking at the same 2 character strings for ©nam and Glósóli in Notepad++ produces similar results. If the Format is set to Encode in UTF-8 the © character is not displayed. If Format is set to ANSII it is but the track name is incorrect. I cannot find any setting that displays the desired result. I’m sure the answer is obvious but I’m not seeing it.
  Any help or explanation would be greatly appreciated</p>
  
  <p>I'm running Windows XP with all the latest patches</p>
  
  <p>Mike</p>