Unicode Support

[Mangix]

will it exist in newer releases? currently, foobar2000 was playing "Bück Dich" and the "ü" got parsed very weirdly.

[Carlos]

What foobar2000 version are you using?

[Mangix]

0.9.1

nothing much changed from 0.9

i also dled Winamp today. the problem is the same. i also looked at the tags and they weren't messed up.

i also tried changing CD Art Display's font but that didn't do anything.

i'll give you an ss to see how it's messed up.

http://img148.imageshack.us/img148/2474/winnpie1de.th.jpg (http://img148.imageshack.us/my.php?image=winnpie1de.jpg)

edit: the window there is made by foobar's winamp plugin. it's normally hidden but i brought it up by double clicking CD Art Display's Volume thing(which i've found does nothing cept bring the window up)

[Carlos]

Wow! Nice screenshot!

I've made a test here using the word "Bück" and mp3tag (the freeware) and it worked!

What program did you use to tag?

That window is from the Winamp API plugin. It seems that the plugin does not support Winamp API for the volume.

[Mangix]

Wow! Nice screenshot!

I've made a test here using the word "Bück" and mp3tag (the freeware) and it worked!

What program did you use to tag?

That window is from the Winamp API plugin. It seems that the plugin does not support Winamp API for the volume.
thanks

i used WMP(because of acurate info and it automatically dls the albumart to the folder that my music is in). but i used mp3tag, foobar2000, and Winamp to see if i can get the same result. but i couldn't. i guess i'll try to wipe out all the tags and see if it works.

well the plugin is in beta so it might be implemented :)

edit: just tried tagging it with mp3tag and it worked. it seems that foobar2000 doesn't support Unicode tags(even though i was told that 0.9 only uses Unicode for ID3 tags. weird.) anyways issue solved :)

[Carlos]

Great news!

Will you contact foobar2000 plugin developer?

If so, can you ask him to add support for ratings and a way to start CAD when foobar2000 is started?

Thanks! :D

[spacemarine]

Hi, I am 99,9 % sure that this issue has to do with UTF-8 Unicode.

First, note that foobar2000 (0.9 or newer) ONLY (!!!) writes ID3v2.4 tags with UTF-8 Unicode encoding.
So if files tagged by foobar contain special characters they will not be shown correctly by CD Art Display.

Files tagged with v2.3 UTF-16 tags (as created by winamp > 5.2) show
correctly.

To verify this, simply use the latest mp3tag beta version (2.35n), it can be set
to write all three relevant kinds of tags, ... with the following results:

v2.3 ISO-8859-1 (the old school style) ---> OK, special characters displayed correctly by CAD
v2.3 UTF-16 Unicode (as written by the new Winamp and others) ---> also OK (!)
v2.4 UTF-8 Unicode (as written by foobar2000 and a few others) ---> In this case special characters (umlauts, etc.) get screwed up by CAD.

Note: for playing the tested files, I used winamp 5.21. All three kinds of tag types showed correctly
(with proper umlauts and accented charcaters) within winamp
(note that the latest winamp (>=5.2) is able to read & display v2.4 UTF-8 tags correctly).

So somehow you must find away to recognize & parse UTF-8 strings correctly.
Please fix this before final the release, it is really annoying if you
have v2.4 UTF-8 tagged files. Thx :P

[Carlos]

Thank you for your insight!

CAD uses a third party ID3 reader module.

I'll try to contact the developer.

[Jorell]

I get the exact same problem reading .ogg files tagged with Winamp 5.21 and using characters like à â é è ê ë î ï etc.

[Carlos]

The ogg reader is also a thirdy party module.

There's nothing I can do about it at least for now.

[spacemarine]

OGG Vorbis uses its own tag format (i.e. not ID3), but guess what, with strings also encoded with
UTF-8 Unicode.

I didn't know that CAD uses external tag readers for getting the metadata.
But thinking abou it, it sure makes sense.

But wouldn't it be possible to get title / track / artist directly from winamp
(other plugins sometimes do that AFAIK, e.g. streamripper) as a temporary "emergency" solution
until the tag reader's authors implement proper UTF-8 support.
Agreed, without a tag reader you can't read covers from the tags and get
other stuff like comments, etc. But what about getting only title / track /artist directly from winamp,
and read the rest via the tag reader library ?
Correct me please if this was an absurd idea ;)

Having a completely working tagreader library would of course be preferrable.
I don't know which tag reader library you are using, but if it's id3lib,
one must know that it is deprecated and not really developed anymore,
and surely has troubles with Unicode. There is a nice library called TagLib
(originally from Linux, but there are Windows ports) which is
able to read ID3v2.4 Tags with UTF-8 properly (and all other older tag versions too of course).
This is the library used by KDE programs such as amaroK, which similar to foobar, write ONLY
v2.4 UTF-8 style tags. So maybe TagLib could provide a solution.

Anyway, this is just what came to my mind, i'm trying to be helpful, because I really would like this fixed
(as UTF-8 tags are becoming more and more common)...

Cheers!
Spacemarine

[Carlos]

Thank you again for your great feedback!

Can you test build 53 please?

http://www.closetosoftware.com/temp/cadrc4b53.zip

I rewrote a tag with foobar2000 to test the UTF-8 and the new build read it properly.

:)

[spacemarine]

First of all let me say a big THANK YOU ! :shock: That was fast :)

All normal "not-so-strange" characters now work fine also with UTF-8 tags.
By "normal" I mean German "Umlauts" like ÄÖÜ, French / Spanish accented characters, Scandinavian characters etc...

When it comes to stranger chars like Cyrillic, Greek Letters or Arabian characters there are some issues (read: shows garbage),
but I think they might be due to the fact that within winamp (I use winamp 5.21) the Unicode support is still limited - it has come
a long way, but there are still issues.
Example: Arabian or Cyillic Letter show correctly in Winamp's file properties "tag editor" window, but show as ? (questionmark)
in the playlist and in the main window (regardless which tag flavor or encoding).
So it's not surprising that CAD gets them wrong. I'm not "crack" enough to know exactly which parts of winamp lack how much unicode support ;)
but I know for sure that there are issues in winamp (always concerning more exotic characters).

It would be interesting to know: Do you get "more" info directly from winamp now or have you modified CAD's tag reading routines - because
if the only the latter is the case then winamp's unicode "deficiencies"
might not matter so much as the tag reader is independent. If, on the other hand winamp passes wrong information,
then it's unicode issues become more important to be considered - if you know what i mean ;)

Another finding: If there are exotic characters (read: cyrillic etc.) in the filename CAD doesn't recognize a song change
(normal accented chats / umlauts etc. work fine) Note: this seems not to be tag related, it happens even if the file has no tag at all.

These are my first findings only, I will do more testing after posting this...

Again, good job, this already is a VERY nice improvement.
:P

[Carlos]

Thank you for your fast reply! :)

I've modified CAD tag reading procedure.

Regarding the path issue: I'm don't know if you had this issue with the previous CAD build. So I've compiled a new build that reads the path using the previous procedure plus a new small procedure:

http://www.closetosoftware.com/temp/cadrc4b55.zip

Can you send me a doc or a text file with a full path (the problematic one) written on it?

By the way, did you test the build with ogg files too?

[spacemarine]

sorry, I did not test OGGs, as I only have mp3s ;)

As to the path issue: the new build does not make any difference.
For me, it's easy to reproduce: Just take a normal file, with a perfectly normal name and use the windows character map to instert a few
(say) cyrillic characters into the filename. If you now play another file, then try to play the renamed file (with the cyrillic chars in the name), it doesn't recognize the song change. ... Then remove the cyrillic chars again ...
and - bingo - the file gets recognized again.

[Carlos]

Just to make sure you get the build 55 (my post above was edited):

http://www.closetosoftware.com/temp/cadrc4b55.zip

:)

[spacemarine]

No difference in build 55. My above descripion to reproduce is still valid for me ;) Just to clarify: just use window's internal "charater map" (in accessoires in the start menu) and add some strange chars to the filename ..
ÖÄÜ, common accented chars, etc. work, but more exotic stuff doesn't.

It just does not get the song change for me, still showing the info of the old track (Track Number / Title / Artist) ... but, as I just noticed, the TIME gets
updated to show correctly for the new track - I have set it to show the REMAINING time - and this gets updated (while name etc. remains from the old track).

[Carlos]

Well, I've made more tests and there are some APIs that won't read the strange chars properly. E.g.: I use an API to determine if a path/file exists or not. This API can't read those strange chars. I also use some APIs to get the current song path in Winamp. This is not working with strange chars.

Even Winamp itself here was not able to load a file with such letters. Just foobar2000.

In resume, this will be a limitation for now because it'll demand more research in order to make it work if it'll one day considering the Winamp API and the Visual Basic 6 limitations.

[Jorell]

woot everything seems to be working fine now, thanks a lot Carlos :)

à â ä é è ê ë î ï ç (and their capital letters counterparts) all works fine from my .ogg files :) (used Winamp 5.21 to tag them)

[Carlos]

Thanks Jorell for your feedback! :)

[spacemarine]

Thank you again, as I mentioned above, this is already a big step forward.
As for complete Unicode support, this sure is a thing which is very hard to achieve
and where many limitations and potential "pitfalls" have to be considered.
Maybe this can be improved further over time, e.g. when Winamp's APIs (and others)
offer better Unicode support :wink:

[Carlos]

You're right! Even unicode ogg files are read properly now!

Thanks again! :)

[horaa]

Firstly, many thanks to mr.carlos!!!
this cd art display is great!!!

well,would like to know that does cd art display support japanese character???

foobar and it's prettypop hv no problem displaying those character...

thanx alot..

http://img358.imageshack.us/img358/7158/cdartdisplay0lu.th.jpg (http://img358.imageshack.us/my.php?image=cdartdisplay0lu.jpg)

[Carlos]

Thanks horaa!

CAD is written in Visual Basic 6 which has some Unicode limitations.

CAD can decode UTF8 and UTF16 if the charset is within the ANSI encoding (character codes 0 to 255).

So I'm afraid that Japanese support will not be possible for now.

[eTaurus]

Hi Carlos,
thank you for this piece of software. In the moment it prevents me from learning for some upcoming tests :roll:
But I have another problem. I use

foobar2k 0.9.4.2

Winamp API emulator 0.94

My CAD version is RC6 preview with RC5 Build229 executable. My music collection is stored in Musepack format with APEv2 tags.
All "exotic" characters like german ä,ö,ü, accented letters like "í", "á" etc. and spanish characters aren't displayed correctly. APEv2 claims to support UTF8 format.
If there is a solution for this problem it would be great because then CD Art Display would be a Grade A+ eye- candy.
BTW, what's the best string for the "title bar" of Winamp Emulator API together with CAD?

Thanks,

eTaurus

/edit: I like to resurrect old threads from their mouldy grave... :wink:

[eTaurus]

Hi Carlos,
thank you for this piece of software. In the moment it prevents me from learning for some upcoming tests :roll:
But I have another problem. I use

foobar2k 0.9.4.2

Winamp API emulator 0.94

My CAD version is RC6 preview with RC5 Build229 executable. My music collection is stored in Musepack format with APEv2 tags.
All "exotic" characters like german ä,ö,ü, accented letters like "í", "á" etc. and spanish characters aren't displayed correctly. APEv2 claims to support UTF8 format.
ID3v2.3 tags are working fine, OGG tags have the same problem.
Moreover the correct display of the tracknumber doesn't work for APEv2 and OGG tags.
If there is a solution for this problem it would be great because then CD Art Display would be a Grade A+ eye- candy.
BTW, what's the best string for the "title bar" of Winamp Emulator API together with CAD?

Thanks,

eTaurus

/edit: I like to resurrect old threads from their mouldy grave... :wink:

[Carlos]

CAD doesn't read Musepack itself.

Here's a suggestion:

FLAC files with Winamp and even foobar2000:

Change the foobar2000\Winamp title to get the album too:

[%artist% - ]$if2(%title%,$filepart(%filename%)) - [%album%]

Note that you will only add " - [%album%]" to the default Winamp title.

This tip is also usefull for .cue files (**). Don't forget: if cover is not changing go to CAD "Control Panel>Troubleshooting" and check the first two settings and try again!!

Finally, send me one of your files with "ä,ö,ü" chars so I can make some tests here.

[eTaurus]

FLAC files with Winamp and even foobar2000:

Change the foobar2000\Winamp title to get the album too:

[%artist% - ]$if2(%title%,$filepart(%filename%)) - [%album%]

Note that you will only add " - [%album%]" to the default Winamp title.
Thank you for the fast reply but I tried this before and it doesn't solve neither the tracknumber problem (which is not that important) nor the display of exotic characters.
Maybe the WA Emulator API gives information that CAD can't interpret as well.
How's the best way to send you the files and what files (Musepack, OGG, MP3) do you want to have? As I said above my whole collection is stored in Musepack and I don't want to rip my CDs to OGG or MP3 now.

eTaurus