[Canola] Unicode mp3 tags
 

It seems Unicode tags do not work in Canola. I have some garbage displayed. Windows displays tags for the same files correctly. In fact, they do not work in built-in player either (yes, final OS2008), but there is no file name navigation, so currently there is no way to use Canola for my collection.

This is strange. N800 is positioned as international device and tags do not work.

So there are two suggestions:
1. Make it working, obviously.
2. Add an option to navigate using file name, instead of tags. See, it may be no tags, or incorrect tags.

BTW, after Canola does not rescan removable disk automatically.

Re: Unicode mp3 tags
 

Probably it's because your font is not supported. Some user reported that on garage already, we'll try to find a better font.

Re: Unicode mp3 tags
 

I do not think so. I would see boxes instead of characters, but what I see looks like that (exactly coped from one track):
"<>45;L 4;O A1>@:8"
Moreover, the same strings are displayed in the built-in Media Player. I would thing that something is wrong with my ID3 tags, but I can see them correctly in both Windows Explorer and some other tags editor.

It would be explained, if Canola uses some system component for parsing tags, which (as most of OS2008) is full of bugs.

And, please, add a navigation using file names. There are so many ways of navigation, just one more. And it would solve all the problems with unreadable tags.

Re: Unicode mp3 tags
 

@vtolkov: which encoding are you using for this files, UTF-8? Canola uses LightMediaScanner, and today we have just configured UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1 (latin-1), so maybe, if you have something outside these two, it may cause problems... however they should show as "?", not garbage. Maybe you could mail me one of these tracks so I can test it here and possible fix the bug? My mail is barbieri at google mail services (gmail, damn spammers).

Re: Unicode mp3 tags
 

glad to hear it support UTF-8 encode.
Is it released yet? Do I have to uninstall the current version and reinstall or their is a patch for that?

Re: Unicode mp3 tags
 

I've converted and tried a short wav sample, converted by Lame into mp3. I've tried different formats. AFAIK, UTF-8 is available only at ID3 v2.4, which, seems, currently is not supported at all. If I choose v2.4 tags, they are not displayed. So I've used ID3 v2.3 with UTF-16 encoding. The sample can be found at http://tolkov.com/valery/scream.mp3 (about 10K).

In fact, I've used tag editor from www.mp3tag.de, and tried different combinations with the same result. Personally, I need Cyrillic Unicode range, other applications support it quite fine.

BTW, Happy Xmas.

Re: Unicode mp3 tags
 

Well, I don't think there's been enough testing on OS2008 yet to tell what's been fixed or newly broken, but the OS2007 media libraries choked on several things: 1) Unicode in tags, 2) Embedded cover art, 3) multiple versions of tags in one file. I found the best thing to do was use a tool like MP3Tag to eliminate 1) and 2) and only write out the latest tag version (v3.3 I think?). Unicode support may have improved in OS2008, but wouldn't bet on it.

Re: Unicode mp3 tags
 

Well, as I see, it is not improved, it is entirely broken. The latest v2.4, which is not supported at all. v2.3 displays garbage instead of non-ASCII characters. All others version do not support Unicode.

Re: Unicode mp3 tags
 

yep it so
but there is no such problem with mpd + mmpc
https://garage.maemo.org/projects/mpd/

Re: Unicode mp3 tags
 

ID3 v2.3 supports ISO-8859-1 and UTF-16, while v2.4 also supports UTF-8 (which is much more common).
However, this only means that the spec specifies a byte for marking the encoding as such. In the end it's up to the tagging program what encoding to write.

Re: Unicode mp3 tags
 

pycage> I do not quite follow you. My point was that none of UTF-8/16 tags work. v2.4 tags are not displayed at all, but v2.3 UTF-16 tags are displayed as garbage ASCII characters.

Re: Unicode mp3 tags
 

What happens, is that unicode characters have their upper byte cut, I guess in a way of conversion to 8-bit string, so Canola display string taking just lower bytes from every unicode character. For example, if ID3 tag contains 044e character, it will be displayed as just 4e. I guess, the issue is somewhere in id3lib, because OS2008 has the same bug.

Re: Unicode mp3 tags
 

If the issue is in id3lib, there are a lot of fixes in Internet. Just google "id3lib unicode" and you will find a lot of different patches and negative statements about unicode support in id3lib.

Re: Unicode mp3 tags
 

Dear Conola team, dear Maemo community - I really lost my hope getting Russian id3 tags in any of the media players on my n800. Starting from built-in and ending with Canola the diagnosis is the same - cyrillic file names are fine -and tags are screwed.
Pls, pls, help.
regard,:confused:
kbovs

Re: Unicode mp3 tags
 

Kbovs :

We are searching for a commercial / free font.. that fits our needs and have the full support to other languages and also retesting the libraries to see if they are ok with the unicode / etc.. Once we do that at last from chinook I believe you will be able. I placed this in the next release, I know it sucks to read that... but we were already searching for a solution to this : / not only for you but for all non latin users ...

BR

Marcelo

Re: Unicode mp3 tags
 

Hello,
thanks for reply. Good news for me - i found Kagu works with russian after converting all my itunes library to id3 v2.3 or v2.4 .So kagu fully supports it. So it would make sense contact kagu team to get details
regards,
Konstantin

Re: Unicode mp3 tags
 

For us, we just need the font.

As we are a small company we need to make sure the font is not "against" anyone's IP and so on.. the code part is ready =) just we (design team) need to find the font that serves the job =)

Re: Unicode mp3 tags
 

i have some mp3 files that have russian tags and they're displayed in Canola correctly, but in my case Canola doesn't play any files with russian filenames or tags. Canola1 played them well.

Re: Unicode mp3 tags
 

mrtn : do you use BORA?
If so there's a known issue about this one. Bora has an OLD dbus that doesn't support non latin chars on the file names.. and thus doesn't play.. so.. for BORA this is beyond our ability..and Nokia fixed it.. but already on chinook,

If you're not playing on chinook let me know.., but we are fighting for this support anyways =)

BR

Re: Unicode mp3 tags
 

handful, forgot to say, my device is 770 (Gregale).
BTW default player plays these files.

Re: Unicode mp3 tags
 

MRTn : yes.. that's the most affected device because you can't have chinook. I posted about it here, and we can't compare with media default player because..
He is the player =) thus he doesn't need DBUS...
we send commands to it using DBUS, but DBUS doesn't understand non latin chars for your device / software...

And we cannot replace your DBUS, because almost the whole system depends on it.. and you would be using a Canola on a useless device... I prefer it to be a Useless canola on your usable device ...

So you have three options, even if we update to support russian etc:

1) convert at least your file names to latin chars... (don't need to convert tags tougth)
2) use another player (like the kagu or others or the default media player actually) that use mplayer, but are not heavy cpu eaters like canola...
3) use canola with mplayer... to play the audios... but this would not work as good as it would with the default media player : /

Sorry for that.. but this is unfortunately a "non-solvable" bug : /

Re: Unicode mp3 tags
 

> Sorry for that.. but this is unfortunately a "non-solvable" bug : /

oh no, it's ok, thanx for answer. i prefer first way =)

Зато у нас язык могучий и страна большая - переживем.

Re: Unicode mp3 tags
 

handful, one more question. as i said, in some cases (when mp3 file has no tags and file name contains russian symbols) russian symbols are showing well. it mean that your font supports russian. so, my question is: does it mean that you can provide support for non-cyrillic mp3 tags or it depends on DBUS too?

Re: Unicode mp3 tags
 

The way Handful explained the issue to myself was that the problem affecting OS2006/2007 (Nokia 770 & N800 users not running OS2008) is with filenames and DBUS only.

As a consequence I went off looking for a utility to assist in Bulk Renaming of files in a folder, that would assist with clever replacing of characters in a filename. (Prior to transfer to our NIT)

This is the post in my blog explaining what I believe we need to do, with a windows program to achieve it. http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?b...16478375837908

I am testing this morning with my Nokia 770 and Spanish music where the filenames use accents. (Tags too, but will leave tags with accents but replace accents in filename)

Re: Unicode mp3 tags
 

OK I have tested on my Nokia 770 with filenames that have accented characters.

Basically if you transfer an accented audio file to your Nokia 770 for example using the USB cable, the file will reside on your Nokia with an accented filename.

Then if you view the Artist, Album, Track in Canola, you will perhaps see strange names that represent the various accented tags within file.
(Canola is viewing the tagging information for Artist, Album, Track but in some cases misinterpreting the tag information, which is also an underlying OS problem?)

Now when you try to play the track, it will not be played! However if you remove/replace the accented characters from the filename it will be played in Canola.
(Although the tagging information may/will still be screwed)

ALL TO NOTE: Playing the same files in OS 2008 on the Nokia N800 or N810, both the accented and non accented file are read and played, but the accented characters are still replaced and in some cases screwed up! This occurs with both Canola and built in Media Player, where I use musicbrainz to tag my files with id3v2.3 tags. Nokia need to fix this, where I would imagine a bug has now been raised on OS2006, 2007 & 2008 ;) Maybe one day soon it will be fixed and Nokia will advise us :rolleyes:

---edit---

So to explain the visual name issue in Media Players a little further I will use the accented track I used as an example on my Nokia 770, N800 & N810.

i.e. My Music\Alejandro Sanz\Más\Corazón partío.mp3

Filename renamed from Corazón partío.mp3 to Corazon partio.mp3 before transfer to Nokia 770 to ensure track would actually be played in Canola on OS2006/2007HE.

In Canola and Media player on OS2006, 2007, 2008 the Artist, Album, Track name are seen via tagging as Alejandro Sanz, Mas, Corazsn partmo
quite different to the Album name of Más and actual track name of Corazón partío

Note how the accented characters are being replaced, and in some cases incorrectly replaced by the OS etc.

This is my layman's explanation of the symptoms as "unicode this or UTF-8, UTF-16 that" not to mention "ID3v1, v2 and then V2.3 V2.4" is just gobbledygook to many people.

The following two screen grabs taken from my N810 with latest OS2008 installed to illustrate the problem clearly in both Canola2 beta and built in Media Players.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2279/...c907ef5b_o.png

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2270/...3dbd494d_o.png

To be sort of aligned with Flickr Community Guidelines, link to my recent Flickr Photos http://www.flickr.com/photos/83537107@N00/

Re: Unicode mp3 tags
 

We can support it, and will.. but the playback on BORA and bellow (2007 and 2006) is compromised (using the built in media player) there's the option of setting mplayer as backend but has some issues (mplayer eats more cpu and thus everything goes slower with background audio)

BR

Re: Unicode mp3 tags
 

Раз,два,три проверка, One, two, three test,test.

I would fully agree - no tags, just russian filename - it shown correcly in canola, as well as in built in player. Replacing standard player as canola engine to mplayer - questionable:
a. cold be slower
b. who said mplayer fine with tags . Mplayer not dealing with tags at all.

so definetly shuold be some other way...
I would probably repaeat myself but there are 2 applications Kagu and nokia media streamer which dealinng perfectly with russian.
regards,
kbovs

Re: Unicode mp3 tags
 

Hi Kbovs:

a. It's slower because Mplayer does decode simple mp3 in software thus consuming more cpu than the default mediaplayer that use the DSP. this also means more battery consumption.

The thing with Kagu : It uses mplayer but it's also "lighter" in all other aspects, what gives not much problem, but we do several transitions and more effects that are affected by mplayer as audio backeend.

"b. who said mplayer fine with tags . Mplayer not dealing with tags at all."
Exactly the tags are dealed with for us in the light media scaner. Thus is can be a mix of bug.


Nokia media stream uses the default medi player straigh (as it is from nokia) so they don't fall into the problem...
and Kagu uses mplayer, that I already explained.

For us is now more about making sure the LMS is handling right all characteres, adding a font for asian languages and testing as much as possible.

The only thing I said is clear : is you cannot use DBUS with musics that has any different character on file name for BORA and bellow. It simply won't get to the destination (media player) thus you cannot play the file. This is however fixed for chinook thus we will make it work.

That's the only real drawback. Others things..are considered as bugs and we will fix it.

I would like to ask also Kbovs some sample files that are giving you trouble inside canola.. so I can add them to my test media card.

Please... Send to my email handful AT gmail

BR

Marcelo

Re: Unicode mp3 tags
 

Marcelo,

I have sent you sample files, with screen shots how it should look like . Good luck with tags and enjoy music.
Konstantin