Diacritic Character Problem

[w3wilkes]

@maxmp

I have an album in an artist folder ;

Blue Öyster Cult\The Best Of Blue Öyster Cult

This album shows up in Albums, Album Artists, Folder Hierarchy and Folder view of Library just fine. I have a playlist that references a track in this album and that entry is ignored. There seems to be a problem with the diacritic character Ö from the playlist to the actual folder names with this character. This playlist works completely on my PC using Logitech Media Server.

[andrewilley]

Make sure the playlist file is in Unicode (UTF-8) text format rather than plain ASCII. There should be an M3U8 extender rather than just M3U.

Andre

[w3wilkes]

How do I tell, see attached playlist. The question is song #51.  The Ö shows correctly in windows notepad, notepad++ and shows as a hex D6 in a hex editor which is correct for this diacritic letter according to Char Map.

Stuff 2.m3u8

[andrewilley]

Try this version, which I've converted to Unicode text encoding using Notepad++ (use menu Encoding > Convert to UTF-8-BOM).

Stuff2-UTF8.m3u8

Andre

[w3wilkes]

@andrewilleyThanks for this tidbit. That works and just as an FYI, I've tested that the BOM is not required and the playlist can have a M3u suffix and still work as long as the file is UTF8. This is consistent with the Unicode spec, in the last paragraph on page 40 it states “Use of a BOM is neither required nor recommended for UTF-8”.

www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode9.0.0/UnicodeStandard-9.0.pdf

 

[andrewilley]

You may find removing the BOM works fine (even if it only saves a couple of header bytes) although it is a useful indicator of how the file has been encoded. PA should cope either way, the important thing is that the file is in UTF-8. Often you'll find even regular M3U files will be saved that way anyway, even though technically the M3U8 extender ought to be used.

Andre

[w3wilkes]

Just curious if the UTF8 requirement for these type diacritic characters is a PA or Android requirement? My home music playing software works fine with ASCII formatted playlists with these diacritic characters.

[andrewilley]

For anything in the ASCII 128+ range, Unicode formatting will be more reliable than plain ASCII. You may find you have Unicode files with .M3U extenders anyway. You can force UTF-8 reading in PA using Settings > Library > Scanner > "Always use UTF-8 for .m3u", otherwise your chosen Tag Encoding mode will be used to interpret ASCII data.

Andre

[maxmp]

Recent Poweramp builds use utf-8 for m3u. This is controlled by "Always Use UTF-8 for .m3u" option (enabled by default). Previously, by default, Poweramp used some 8-bit non-utf-8 encoding for m3u files (Settings / Library / Scanner / Tag Encoding). Most PC software do this too, but if (selected or autodetected) codepage matches, you get diacritic chars OK.  Thanks!

[w3wilkes]

Thanks for pointing this setting out. It makes it so I don't have to convert my playlists between platforms!