manorbas Posted March 4, 2020 Share Posted March 4, 2020 v3 build 860 arm-64 Galaxy S10, Android 10, One UI 2.0 Hi All, I believe I have identified a bug concerning playlists. The scenario is as follows: - I have a number of externally created .m3u playlists. - On other music players, such as MusicBee, the playlists are complete and play faultlessly. - On PA, all songs appear correctly in their respective albums/folders and play accordingly. - However, some songs, it seems those with accented characters or with accented apostrophes, fail to show in a compiled playlist which plays faultlessly elsewhere. - The .m3u file log shows each song properly and, as I say, I have no issues with other players. - Therefore, PA seems to have an issue showing songs in externally created .m3u playlists with certain characters. The issue is unique only to playlists and is not replicated across the songs/albums/folders library in general. - Changing the file type to .m3u8 does not solve the problem. I would be very grateful for any guidance and or an appropriate fix. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andrewilley Posted March 4, 2020 Share Posted March 4, 2020 The .M3U file format does not officially support non regular ASCII characters, you need to use .M3U8 instead, which uses UTF-8 character encoding. Often just renaming the extension from .M3U to .M3U8 is sufficient to make the files compatible. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M3U . Andre Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
manorbas Posted March 5, 2020 Author Share Posted March 5, 2020 16 hours ago, andrewilley said: The .M3U file format does not officially support non regular ASCII characters, you need to use .M3U8 instead, which uses UTF-8 character encoding. Often just renaming the extension from .M3U to .M3U8 is sufficient to make the files compatible. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M3U . Andre Andre, Thanks very much indeed for the guidance. Further experimentation has established the following: - Removing the offending suspected characters from the filenames and tags resolves the issue. They therefore seem to be the problem. - As above, it does not appear to be an issue per se with the .m3u file type since other players that can play .m3u playlists show and play the relevant songs without issue. It appears to be that PA's ability to read the .m3u file type is in some way limited. - Changing the file names to .m3u8 from .m3u does not, sadly, resolve the problem. - However, recreating the playlists specifically as .m3u8 files does resolve the issue. i can therefore readily re-export all my playlists as .m3u8 files to solve my own issue and that is what I shall do. As for development more generally, the developer may want to have a look at the above to see if there is a simple fix. Thanks again! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andrewilley Posted March 5, 2020 Share Posted March 5, 2020 The M3U spec specifically does not support extended characters beyond the 7-bit codes, that's why there is a UTF-8 encoded version too (M3U8). So the fact that Poweramp is not able to read 8-bit ASCII codes in M3U files is as per spec, even if other apps to allow it. Andre Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flyingdutchman Posted March 6, 2020 Share Posted March 6, 2020 I can add that there is also a thing called bom or byte order mark which are special invisible characters at the beginning of the .m3u which also may have an impact on how the file is interpreted. You can test its effect with my playlist manager app which has an option to write the bom. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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