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[kstuart]

Purchasing Media Center 18 was the first step, for me, in cleaning up my music collection (I wanted to first decide on a Music Library program before starting the job of cleaning up all the tags, filenames, etc.).

So, this question is about both MC18 and Windows in general.

I am running Windows using the standard default installation for the U.S. of standard U.S. keyboard and character sets (whatever they may be).

When I use the various online sources to tag and name my ripped CDs, the results often include characters that are not included in the default settings for U.S. Windows, but are appropriate for the names of artists, albums and song titles that are in foreign languages.

I have already had some problems with some Windows programs in dealing with the resulting filenames, for example, the otherwise excellent program Teracopy will not copy some files with special characters in the filenames.

So, what - in general - is the best way to deal with this situation ?

For example, an excellent album is the collaboration between:

Ali Farka Touré and Toumani Diabaté

who live in a French speaking country.

There is the problem of how to do searches when some online databases change their names to:

Ali Farka Toure and Toumani Diabate

Similarly, one of the brilliant musical artists of the last two decades spells her name:

Björk

and some databases do so, while others use the anglicized:

Bjork

So again, the overall question is how to best deal with this situation, and also, how does Media Center deal with it ?

Thanks!

[MrC]

Many of us use full character sets.  See attached image.

[kstuart]

I think you are missing some words in your reply ??

[MrC]

It's not really clear what your specific question is, so my reply was general.

I use full diacritics for Albums, Artists, etc.   Sometimes MC returns looked-up CD's with these characters, but it depends on the previous submissions.  If the are missing, I add and correct the submission.

External look-ups, via MC's Links, typically work, and if not, can be addressed.

[yannis]

I hope you won't mind if I chip in here my related cry for help. I also use extensive "special" characters but with the additional twist that my locale is Greek (win 7 64). One problem is that when I export a csv, all the special chars turn to garbage. The thing is that I chose to rename my files incl. these special chars and am now afraid of the possibility of problems arising because of that. Any thoughts on how to address this?

[MrC]

I don't see that the CSV writer in MC is UTF-aware (outputting the proper 3-code leading sequence). 

Someone from JRiver will have to comment...

[kstuart]

And it would be helpful if a JRiver person could also comment on exactly which character set is used by MC18 when you select the "English" (US) language choice, thanks.

[yannis]

This thread seems to be dropping quickly down the list.

Can someone please comment?

[Matt]

Our CSV writer should be RFC 4180 compliant and it saves the final output as UTF-8.

We don't write a BOM to UTF-8 files, since this isn't widely recommended.

These seem like good choices to me, but we're happy to discuss if someone disagrees.

[kstuart]

Exactly which character set is used by MC18 when you select the "English" (US) language choice?  Thanks.

[Matt]

Exactly which character set is used by MC18 when you select the "English" (US) language choice?  Thanks.

Where are you describing?

Everything in Media Center is Unicode, so there's not really a 'character set' in the sense that I'm familiar with the term (ie. how characters 128-255 are interpreted).

[yannis]

OK, the garbage characters thing was resolved by more careful importing of the CSV in Excel. My wrong.

I know that my main question wasn't exactly a MC issue, but from your experience, are there any possible downsides of using "special characters" in the filenames? I mean chars related to another locale setting.