Unicode tags & OS2008 media players
February 26, 2008 1:59 pm maemoI uploaded some mp3 files into my OS2008. Some of them have Russian (UTF-8) tags. And … what a disappointment. Shiny new Canola shows total crap instead of Russian. Most of other players too. The only decent ones turned to be (drums roll…) MediaBox and Kilikali. Audio Tag Tool specially intended for editing tags – falls flat when it comes to UTF-8. Are we in 2008 or 1998?
February 26th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
Are you sure they are properly tagged as UTF-8 tags ?
Most Russian strings in id3 tags tend to be encoded in some native character set or UTF-8 while the id3 tag encoding is set to iso8859-1.
February 26th, 2008 at 3:05 pm
teuf: I am sure they are UTF-8 because I tagged them myself using easytag. Though I know – a lot of russian mp3s use cp1251 (crap, crap, crap, I hate windoze for that encoding).
February 26th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
There is even a bug in https://garage.maemo.org/tracker/?atid=1989&group_id=125&func=browse
(see bug 2066 – I cannot open it for some reason)
February 26th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
Hi,
https://garage.maemo.org/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=2066&group_id=125&atid=1989 fails to open, at least on our machines.
I’m taking care of these non-ASCII issues and it should work. Please try with last canola2 and remove and then add the media folders again (“Force rescan” is just a trigger to scan for new media or file changes, since the file have not changed they’ll remain untouched).
Also, some ID3 fields have no pre-defined encoding. For these we try some converters in order to get them in UTF-8, the first one in the list is ISO-8859-1. You can change this list with:
cnl-get-prefs canolad
cnl-set-prefs canolad charsets “[‘XXXX’, ‘YYYY’]”
where XXXX and YYYY are iconv charsets.
Thanks,
February 26th, 2008 at 3:24 pm
I use RockBox with my hardware MP3 player, or rather Ogg player to be precise (Sandisk Sansa). If there is a cyrylic subset in a Unicode font in OS2008, all should be doable by modifying a few configuration files.
I know being Polish, that western programmers tend to forget that a simple modification in one place is a showstopper to any simple user not using ANSI/Latin-1 encoding and a major inconvenience to others.
BTW, why do you play MP3 rather then Ogg files?
February 26th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
Gustavo:
The right link is https://garage.maemo.org/tracker/?atid=1989&group_id=125&func=browse
(the Canola 2.0 bugs). But the bug 2066 is still not clickable 🙁
I set the list to UTF-8, ISO8859-15 – no changes. The albums/artists still do not include Russian names.
February 26th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
Llewelyn: I use MP3 files because they were on the disks I bought in Russia;)
February 26th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
Quod Libet and ExFalso are very fussy about writing the correct UTF-8 tags.
EasyTag has a history of being non-conformant.
February 26th, 2008 at 5:39 pm
Hi Sergey,
I reimplemented the plugin for Light Media Scanner responsible for parsing mp3 metadata, and one of the reasons I did it, was because the older plugin had some issues with different encodings and so.
I tested here with various different encodings and it seems to work fine.
Could you please send me some files that are badly displayed to my mail so I could check here what is the problem. In the mail, please send me what should be displayed, as I don’t know Russian :D.
It would also be nice to know what canola version you are using.
Some id3 tags are malformed and the encoding field is wrong, but let me check first.
Regards