Playlists does not recognize foreign characters

[radio.buzz]

Hello,

I have Poweramp build-905 installed.

After years of pleased use, all of the sudden songs from my playlists with foreign characters, such as the French "accent aigu", are no longer recognized, although they are in the archive.

Those songs simply are omitted: A playlist with originally 311 songs now shows 209 songs only.

I already run several times a complete new read-in of the archive.

I set the Tag code to "Western (ISO-8859-1)" and activated "always use UTF-8 for .m3u files".

By the way: A playlist, saved explicit as .m3u8-file, even is fully ignored!

Thanks for any support!

[andrewilley]

Ideally you should be saving any playlist files that contain extended character set symbols as Unicode (UTF-8), not 8-bit ASCII text which can be ambiguous.

The extender for such filenames to be scanned is just .M3U8, not .M3U8-FILE .

Andre

[radio.buzz]

1 hour ago, andrewilley said:

The extender for such filenames to be scanned is just .M3U8, not .M3U8-FILE .

Little misunderstanding: The file of course is named ###.m3u8 ... but is shown as empty (see screenshot).

So far, all other playlists are generated in MediaMonkey and export as ###.m3u (see screenshot as well).

Up to now, none of them caused any problem in Poweramp, just all of the sudden the - for instance - french songs with accent are omitted (display shows 209 songs, although list covers 311 tracks).

[andrewilley]

What does the .m3u8 file contain? All that PA really needs to match is the filename and the folder that contains it, the rest of the path and all the #EXTxxxx syntax should be ignored. Check what BOM (Byte Order Mark) identifier is being used; normally it's ignorable, but if it's wrong it could prevent the file from being read. Load it into something decent like Notepad++ on a PC to check the accurate contents. Oh. and the songs must already exist in PA's scanned music library for a playlist to be able to access them.

Andre

[radio.buzz]

4 minutes ago, andrewilley said:

What does the .m3u8 file contain? All that PA really needs to match is the filename and the folder that contains it,

Regrettably I am not at home to send you a screenshot, but - as a short reply - the .m3u8 is just the source .m3u file, saved in the .m3u8 format (.m3u opened in VLC-player, than "save as .m3u8").

And that one include filename and folder.

Regarding the original .m3u: It is obvious that the problem is with the french typo, because all tracks without accent for instance are recognized.

[andrewilley]

VLC's M3U8 output is pretty messed up, have a look at the file, it seems to %hex stuff back to plain ASCII, even spaces in filenames.

e.g. a simple Windows playlist entry such as:
\\DiskStation\music\Moods Collections\New Pure Moods\1-02 Return to Innocence - Enigma.mp3
becomes:
#EXTINF:243,Enigma - Return to Innocence
file://DiskStation/music/Moods%20Collections/New%20Pure%20Moods/1-02%20Return%20to%20Innocence%20-%20Enigma.mp3

The #EXTINF line will be ignored by PA (it uses embedded tag data) but the path line can't be resolved. In fact, all PA will actually use is the first folder level and the filename:
New Pure Moods\1-02 Return to Innocence - Enigma.mp3

Load the original M3U into something like Notepad++ and re-save it without changing the contents, just the text encoding method in the menu. Or use foobar2000 to convert it. In some cases just renaming it to .M3U8 will work.

Andre

[radio.buzz]

Mornin'

I followed your hint and opened all source .m3u with ListFix and saved them as .m3u8

After that I replaced all .m3u on my mobile by the new generated .m3u8 files and re-read the archive: Heureka, it worked!

The only bad thing: I spent a lot of time for this conversion (~190 playlists); the next time I changed something on MediaMonkey which requires update of playlist, I will try to save as .m3u8 (name) directly from MediaMonkey.

Thanks for your precious comments!

[andrewilley]

It's not normally an issue if you stick to 7-bit ASCII (upper and lowercase letters, numbers and common punctuation symbols) but as soon as you start to go beyond that you can start getting conflicts between the extended 8-bit ASCII set and Unicode/UTF-8. Better to just stick with UTF-8 anyway, that should be safe for everything.

Andre

[radio.buzz]

Yes, that's my "learning" now: As I said, next time I will try to save any amended playlist right away in .m3u8 out of MediaMonkey.

Thanks!