Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[syserror]

My apologies if there is a more appropriate place for MC11 issues.  I looked for a forum dedicated to it and did not see one, redirect me if there is one.

System: MC .133 on XP SP2.

Had ripped songs to APE from Suzanne Vega album 99.9 F(degree symbol) using EAC.  EAC properly displayed the superscript circle for the degree symbol.  The song names properly display the degree symbol in Windows Explorer as well.

Under MC11, the degree symbol in the APE tags or filenames display instead as a square.

The much larger concern, however, is that file conversion silently hangs on any of these files.  Attempting to convert any files from the album to MP3 will get to where the conversion dialog says 'converting', but no blue bars ever draw and nothing ever happens; the conversion must be stopped.  If the degree symbols are eliminated from APE tags and filenames, the files can then be converted to MP3.

APE tag in a hex editor shows as
39 39 2e 39 20 46 e0 b0 80

for
99.9 F(degree symbol)

Let me know if there is any more info which could be useful.

Aaron

[glynor]

My apologies if there is a more appropriate place for MC11 issues.  I looked for a forum dedicated to it and did not see one, redirect me if there is one.

You have come to the right place.  Unfortunately, other than a little tidbit (which you may already know), I don't have an absolute answer to your problem.

Under MC11, the degree symbol in the APE tags or filenames display instead as a square.

I can tell you that the "square" you mentioned is a placeholder that Windows uses when it encounters a font encoding that it doesn't understand (or is non-printable).  For example, if you open a text file with UNIX (or Mac) line endings on a PC you will see the squares everywhere there should be a line break (and the text file will be all run together into one line).

I can also tell you that I have plenty of files with non-alphanumeric tag characters including accents, umlauts, and a bunch of other wonky (is that a word?) characters.  They've never caused me problems.

As a simple workaround, I'd probably try deleting the box character out and then copy/paste a new degree symbol into the tag inside MC (using the Character Map tool as a source for the degree symbol).  I work in a Multimedia Services department (graphics, AV, video edting, etc) at a scientific research institution, and I have to work with funky text characters all the time (eg Greek characters).  When you move them from one application to another and they cause problems (as they sometimes do), you can spend days banging your head against the wall trying to figure out why, or you can just delete the errant character and re-add it from within the app that you are trying to use.

I hope this helps a little.  Really, this would be more of a question for Matt (or for someone else who understands the character encodings used for Tags by the APE encoder).

[Matt]

It sort of looks like whatever created that APE tag incorrectly did the UTF-8 encoding, because I think (degree) should be two bytes: "C2 B0" instead of three bytes: "E0 B0 80"

Just do "Update Tags (from filename)" in Media Center to get the files properly tagged.  

As an aside, you may also want to check out Media Center's secure ripping -- it's as or more secure than EAC.

[syserror]

Thanks for the feedback.  Build from filenames does import the right character, and you were correct on the UTF-8 encoding - hexedit shows it after fixing as c2 80.

I've been partial to EAC for a while because of speed (since it can detect C2 errors and I have a Plextor 32x with no caching and good C2 support, this eliminates a double read in the normal good case), and for support of offset correction and read into lead-in/lead-out.  I hadn't really tried out MC for ripping, but if it can behave comparably I'd prefer to use MC for that too.

It appears that MC11 has an option for offset correction, but it is always grayed out.  Should this be enabled by the final version?  Also, can you confirm if MC11 secure mode can take advantage of C2 error detection and read into lead-in/lead-out?  Thanks.

Aaron