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[-Michael]

I am having difficulties with grave, acute and hat accents over words, as is used in non-English languages. 50% of the time, after MC crashes, the programme shows its distaste of my foreign albums and artist by scrambling the names like so: D; i; r; :; J; ř; í; B; ě; l; o; h; á; v; e; k; C; z; P; a; m; n; s; t. After I do a "search and find" action to eliminate the little gremlins, I often end up with these results: RogeMua,Jn-cqstfé.yWh:diPl. I lose lots of data. In "Library tools" I then "update files (from library)" to save changes.

I spend 1-4 hours each time rectifying this shenanigans on 6,000 songs and movements. My question is as follows:
1) am I overlooking encoding, language or other settings somewhere in MC? and
2) does MC normally not accept non-English alphabet characters in name, artist, album and genre fields? I need to know this.

The big picture is promising. MC is powerful, elaborate and flexible; I believe I will continue with it. However I will not correct any more of my scrambled music data until I know I will not be wasting my time.

Using MC a total of 1 month; iMac 10.7.5; JRMC18.0.164.

[JimH]

I've never heard of a problem like that.  Are you using any third party plug-ins?  Are the files local?

MC's library is different from the tags themselves that are stored in the file.  Check which one is corrupt.

MC's Library Tools can move this data from its library to the tag or vice versa.  Experiment with a few files and the tools.

[-Michael]

I've never heard of a problem like that.  Are you using any third party plug-ins?  Are the files local?


MC's library is different from the tags themselves that are stored in the file.  Check which one is corrupt.


MC's Library Tools can move this data from its library to the tag or vice versa.  Experiment with a few files and the tools.

Hi Jim, thanks for opening up MC to Mac users. I am seeing lots of possibilities over anything I have used before. The chance of having radio and video in MC is cool enough.

I am using no plug-ins. The files are on a Lacie Q2 hard-disk connected to the iMac via USB2.

When I open a problem file in Decibel, the file appears corrupt: the name is wrong. When I open the file up in QT Player 7 the name is read OK. I am not expert enough to determine where the corruption is. Nevertheless, when I correct the library data, and try to export it into the file, it normally sticks. New crashes scramble yet more files though.

Read my response above. I remember reading another post about similar problems a couple of weeks ago. It only happens in fields with accents in them.

[JimH]

Next time you have a problem, look at the filename and at the tag.  Is one wrong?

It is also possible it is a drive problem. Try updating the firmware.

[Weedos123]

It was me who mentioned about the accents

I too still get this with v156. Could have something to do with character sets as 1 song that always does it, is French and irrespective of the no of times i re-tag it. The track name has "Sene" in it and the last e has an acute accent on it.
Paul

However the files in question at the time were aiffs.  After that I did some experimenting and deleted the aiff file from the library and replaced it with a flac version.  The flac version didn't have any problem with the tag or the filename and so after a few crashes I replaced the flac with a different aiff version and so far the issue has gone away.  Whether it was that or just something being fixed in a later version, who knows.

All I know is the problem seems to have disappeared by version 164

[-Michael]

Thank you Jim and Weedos. I do have lots of aifs and aiffs. I see acute e's go funny in the filename (if you hover over the file in MC you see it) but in Finder in Mac they look OK. This is inconsistent. The problem could be there.

I'll need a couple of weeks probably to check all of these suggestions out properly: very busy with work right now. I'll feed back if and when I  get to the bottom of this.

[Fred1]

I have seen this also with m4a (AAC) files today.

The Filename field behaves strange with files that contain Umlauts and Accents in their name.
Gaps (blanks) appear where the Umlauts and Accents should be.
The files themselves are shown correct in the Finder app.

I don't know what happens if such files are moved by MC, however.

[-Michael]

Fred1: I concur with all the observations you make, so from me +1. Your last point raises an interesting question.

[johnjen]

I had that problem as well.

I 'fixed it' by using a meta file editor (Media Rage) and re-building ALL of the data fields (Artist, Album, Name, etc) for those files that were missing data.  For instance, the artist name was a single letter instead of the entire name etc.

I don't know how the fields got mangled and fortunately there weren't a huge number to fix but it 'looked' like MC tried to 'fill in' the missing data with colons and semicolons etc. in between the letters it inserted (I assume that is what was going on).  And as a guess it probably happened after I pushed the 'fix the metafile errors' button, buried somewhere in the innerds of the program.

JJ

[jmrdc]

+1 here, too.  I couldn't find a file small enough to send to Matt, but I thought there may be other users at some point with the same problem.  I'll look into Media Rage to see if that solves anything.

Using .164 and 10.8

[Fred1]

Here an example from my library:

[-Michael]

Fred1 I noticed any field with an apostrophe ' gets scrambled. I'll try the workarounds in a week's time and get back on this.

[Matt]

If anyone has a file that consistently imports incorrectly, please send a copy to logs at jriver dot com.

You could use Dropbox or Google Drive if the file is large.

Thanks.

[Fred1]

You don't need a certain file to reproduce this.
Rename a field and put a string that contains one character of [äöüßÄÖÜ'] or an accented character into it.
Then copy that field to another string-field and you get something like this:

 .

It's not fun to use.

MacOS 10.7.5 on iMac core2duo.

[JohnT]

A build is out which fixes this problem, thanks for the hints on how to reproduce.
It was a bad bug: when one of the characters in the text had the high order bit set (like ä) it would write UTF-16 text tags, which is fine except we were writing 4-bytes per character rather than 2-bytes. Sorry for the trouble.

[Fred1]

Had a funny time editing these out .

Thanks for the quick update - working fine now!

[Fred1]

Sorry, there is still a Problem :

MC makes "Cancian Para Un Niao De La Calle" out of "Canción Para Un Niño De La Calle".

Accented letters ( here [óñ] ) are misinterpreted.

[JohnT]

Sorry, there is still a Problem :

MC makes "Cancian Para Un Niao De La Calle" out of "Canción Para Un Niño De La Calle".

Accented letters ( here [óñ] ) are misinterpreted.

Can you give me some tips for reproducing this?  I changed the name and artist of a track to "Canción Para Un Niño De La Calle" and did "update tags from library" and then "update library from tags" but the extended characters are still there.

[Fred1]

Hi John,

i investigated a little further.
It's no issue of MC but a strange behavior of AppleScript.

Background:

I purchased a big collection of CDs from an elder collector.
He was not computer-savvy, but wrote down the "tags" of his CDs in a flat text file in a very precise manner.
Therefore i would like to transfer the data into MC for all the new CDs i ripped.

That's why i wrote a little AppleScript which takes the data from the text file and outputs it to a custom field in MC.
Unfortunately the AppleScript fails with accented letters.

By the way, do you plan to support AppleScript in the future?

[JohnT]

I've never used Applescript, but we have a web based API that you might be able to utilize from it.

[jmrdc]

Sorry, maybe I missed something - where is the solution to this? 

Thanks!!

[JohnT]

Sorry, maybe I missed something - where is the solution to this? 

Thanks!!

The bug was fixed in build 167, but if you have files with tags that were written with extra semi-colons and spaces by one of the earlier builds, you'll need to manually fix them in Media Center - re-enter the tag data and Media Center will re-save the file with the correct tags.  Sorry for the trouble.

[jmrdc]

The bug was fixed in build 167, but if you have files with tags that were written with extra semi-colons and spaces by one of the earlier builds, you'll need to manually fix them in Media Center - re-enter the tag data and Media Center will re-save the file with the correct tags.  Sorry for the trouble.

Could you just erase the library and use one of the newer builds to repopulate the library?  I only ask because I have +30,000 songs and there are a lot of tracks that are affected.

[-Michael]

Hi, I have been able to edit files recently, and while MC still crashes (it is in Alpha) the text data no longer scrambles. Thank you so much.