Music can not be played (incorrect windows encoding)

[corenmarc]

Hello, my music cannnot be played. A few years ago I didn't have the problem but now it is everytime. If a song has a symbol like "è" oder "é" or "&" the song can not be played cause Poweramp don't acvept symbols like accent etc. How can i fix the issue? This is a horrible mistake. I don't need a tip like download the app again, the unlocker, newest version etc... nothing will help... this is poor for a music player...

[andrewilley]

Poweramp works fine with all sorts of symbols, it copes with full Unicode characters, including accents, blobs, other symbols, etc.

Could you more specifically elaborate on what your problem is?

Andre

[corenmarc]

Yeah this is acutally my problem. My Poweramp don't recognize this symbols and the song is not hoing to be played and it starts with the next one. What can I do? Further I didn't have the problem but since 1 year I have this problem? Is the a file to download with a symbol package or something else? I installed it a few times again... nothing helps. But earlier all songs were played. 

[andrewilley]

As I said, symbols are fine in all tags. The example I posted showed such a file being played.

Could you explain further what problem you seem to be seeing, where the symbols are found. A screenshot might help.

If they are in the folder or filenames, please try a FULL Rescan in PA Settings=>Library.

Andre

[corenmarc]

[corenmarc]

The is standing the file can not be played and the symbol would be á and now the is standing a "?" As you can see down in the picture. 

[andrewilley]

That's a filename that was scanned into the library in the past but no longer exists in your file system (possibly moved, or possibly copied using a file management tool that doesn't respect Unicode names) so it gets skipped.

Or it could be a misnamed reference in a Playlist, but you don't provide any details of what mode you playing in when you see that screen. What does the Library category view show?

Whichever, try a FULL Rescan as I suggested, and see what shows in the Library afterwards as that should find any moved entries.

Andre

[corenmarc]

I tried a fullscan but it don't work. It is the same problem. I made playlists in windows media player as a .m3u file. The songs are in different binders. All files without symbols like "&" èé etc. Are working. Only this files can not be played. The songs are actually on my phone. What do you mean with the playing mode? I actually play the songs from the playlist. Now I tried to search the song in Poweramp and it works. Thats crazy. Only from my playlist it doesn't work. So I think there is the problem. How it can be fixed? Is .m3u the problem? I don't want to create new playlists in Poweramp. It would be nice to take my playlists from my pc like I did it before. 

[maxmp]

@corenmarc can you play these files directly via All Files category? Could you please share one of such files (send to gpmaxmpz@gmail.com) for tests?

Please note that windows will encode some filename characters incorrectly (from Android/Linux point of view), while you may have correct unicode representation for them in the playlist - in this case please share the playlist as well.

Poweramp has no issues with playing files with any characters in the filename though.

[corenmarc]

Is your mail adress correct? It could not be delivered

[andrewilley]

1 hour ago, corenmarc said:

I made playlists in windows media player as a .m3u file. The songs are in different binders. All files without symbols like "&" èé etc. Are working. Only this files can not be played.

Ah, this is the very first time you have mentioned Playlists at all, although I did wonder if that could be the issue. Do the same songs play correctly from Poweramp's normal Library Categories - e.g. by tapping on a song name in the Albums or All Songs views?

Playlists created on Windows devices (e.g. in Windows Media Player) as M3U files may well be using what is called 8-bit ASCII, which is rather basic and can only represent a limited number of extended characters. It also confusingly can use different extended codes to the Unicode ones that the Android file systems uses. Using M3U8 format would help, and that should use Unicode.

So when you copied the song files from your PC to your phone, the filenames were presumably transferred using the more extensive Unicode system that allows for thousands of characters. But the playlist file may still be referring to songs using old extended-ASCII coding (which only allows for a couple of hundred characters). And if they aren't the same, the filename cannot be found as it is in effect spelt differently.

For example, in Unicode UTF-8 on Android, an e-acute character is always represented by U+00E9 (or the number 233). In the more modern Windows-1252 (ISO‑8859‑1) character set, an e-acute is also 233. However in the original extended-ASCII, an e-acute would be character 130 - which I know from a lifetime of using 'Alt+130' on my keyboard to properly type my name as André.

 

43 minutes ago, corenmarc said:

Is your mail adress correct? It could not be delivered

The email address should be "gpmaxmpz@gmail.com", not "gmal".

André

[corenmarc]

Okay I think it should be gmail and not gmal so now I could send you an email. 

[corenmarc]

Thank you. Do you know as which playlist file I have to save the playlist in windows media player so the unicode is correct or is there no way in windows media player? I think there are only two options. .m3u and .wpl. is .wpl modern and could be read by the Poweramp player?

Edited February 19, 2023 by corenmarc

[andrewilley]

Poweramp can read both formats, the problem is how the file names are encoded in the playlist file versus how they are encoded in the storage on your Android device.

Andre

[maxmp]

@corenmarc thanks for the files. First, windows playlist as these may only work if you disable Always use UTF-8 for M3U option (and optionally set Tag Encoding to win-1252).

And we have playlist entry which looks like ..\Matt Pokora\01 - La nuit est à nous.mp3 (Poweramp looks for filename here) in windows-1252, so we get à also correctly decoded to C3 A0.

C3 A0 is Latin Small Letter a with Grave

Now we have file system name which looks like 01 - La nuit est à nous.mp3. Here à is encoded as 61 CC 80.

This is latin A (61) with extra CC 80 (COMBINING GRAVE ACCENT) which looks like à, but it is a completely different symbol, and that's can't be matched to a normal à (Latin Small Letter a with Grave). 

I don't know why your software encodes extended latin characters this way for filenames and differently - for playlist entries, but those are different symbols and these are not matched in Poweramp.

 

[andrewilley]

@corenmarc How many of these playlist files do you have, and how many of the contained entries read incorrectly when you move them to your Android device? If there aren't too many, it might be possible edit them in a text editor to correct the corrupted entries. It might be a bit of a fiddly task, but once it's done you won't have to do it again.

Or, what program are you using to generate these playlists, could you use something else that might not have so many issues?

Andre

[corenmarc]

All files with the specual symbols move incorrectly. Its about 200 songs  what can I do? Another format? Like .wpl? Is it better for symbols? Another chance isnt there in windows media olayer and i dont want to make some new playlists. It costs so much time. 

[andrewilley]

The problem is unfortunately pretty fundamental. The characters used in the saved Playlist files are not the same ones found in the filenames in the folders of your Android device - even though they may look visually the same. Think of it like some fonts which display a capital letter "I" (i.e. the letter between "H" and "J") and a lowercase letter "l" (the letter between "k" and "m") the same way. Although they may look identical, they are clearly not the same when you try to finding matching words.

There are a few things you could try. Copy a few of the problem audio files from your PC to your phone again, using a different method. e.g. use a wi-fi file explorer app, or drag and drop via Windows using a USB cable. Or zip a bunch of the files on the PC, and then unzip them again in the phone.

Even renaming the audio filename on your phone to re-type the problem "é" character again manually, and/or do the same with a playlist file in a text editor (erase the existing "é" character in the playlist and type it again on the keyboard) might help. 

Then do a Full Rescan in PA and see if the entries in playlists for those files seem any better.

You could also try loading an M3U playlist file that you've created within Windows Media Player into another program - such as foobar2000 or VLC Media Player. Check all the songs in the list are still locatable on the PC (no errors) and then export the playlist out to a fresh M3U8 file. Then copy that file to your phone for testing.

If you find a method which works for a few test files, do the same process for the others.

Andre

[corenmarc]

Hello. I want to say I found an option to fix the problem. If I put my Playlists into device and make a rescan, the files are failed. If I go into Libray to playlists and import the databased Playlists the songs are correct. Thank you. 

[maxmp]

@corenmarc where exactly did you get the files like this? I wonder what software encodes characters like this. Windows media player seems to reinterpret (normalize) such characters. If I save m3u8 playlist from Foobar2000, it works in Poweramp as filenames are saved as is without reinterpretation.

[6b6561]

@maxmplook's like @corenmarc is using WMP.

On 2/19/2023 at 6:12 PM, corenmarc said:

I tried a fullscan but it don't work. It is the same problem. I made playlists in windows media player as a .m3u file.