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Author Topic: special characters and lost files...  (Read 5340 times)

eagebhart

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special characters and lost files...
« on: July 06, 2016, 01:29:59 am »


I am migrating from OS X to Linux.  This library worked fine in OS X.  But once I got the paths fixed  /Users/eric --> /home/eric there are lots of files that are still missing.  I have checked,
and they are indeed where they are supposed to be.  But this is similar if not identical to problems I've had getting android to find music in playllists.
This is tango music and therefore has a fair amount of special characters. Mostly, this music was ripped with XLD, which I had thought does a pretty good job with encoding.

Within, MC, the paths look fine.  They read the way they should.  In the shell, they don't look so good, that could just be that I haven't set the encoding properly there.  They look fine in
the file browser.

I tried doing a move/rename to put them in a new place,  MC successfully changed the path to the new directory path, directory-root/artist/album/name, but didn't actually move the files. Probably because it couldn't find them.

in this case almost all of the offending characters are the i with a slanted dot on top.

>> pwd
/home/eric/Music/mytango/Master_tango_flac/An��bal Troilo/Adi��s Pampa m��a - 1945-1946/
--> ls
'01 Adi'$'\303\263''s Pampa m'$'\303\255''a (feat. Alberto Marino & Floreal Ru'$'\303\255''z).flac'

I'm not actually sure how to fix this.  I don't really want to start over with a fresh import because I have playlists that I'd like to continue to utilize.
I tried reimporting the directory and that does actually work

I can't think of a way to re-import 1000's of songs as needed without ending up with duplicates, half of which would be not found.

I'm no expert at MC.  I can get around in it fine, but I don't understand the underlying problem here. There must be an encoding issue that is only showing up
because of my migration from OS X to linux.

If anyone has some ideas about how to manipulate my library without losing my playlists, I'd be happy to hear them.  Then again, maybe it's time to start over... argh. 
Smart playlists would continue to be fine.

Maybe I can export my playlists, and re-import the library, then re-import the playlists.  They will probably have the same issues, the new linux compatible names will not
match the names in the playlists.  I also have all my ratings which I would not like to lose.

That's all I can think of at the moment.  MC is super powerful, I just can't think of a way to fix this, short of re-importing everything.
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eagebhart

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Re: special characters and lost files...
« Reply #1 on: July 09, 2016, 12:29:48 pm »

I've insured that my locale is  en_US.utf8.

I switched to urxvt for my terminal and all the paths look fine. All characters render correctly in the terminal and in media center.

Is there a way to somehow remap my playlists and ratings if I reimport all of my music ?

 
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mwillems

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Re: special characters and lost files...
« Reply #2 on: July 09, 2016, 02:01:27 pm »

I've insured that my locale is  en_US.utf8.

I switched to urxvt for my terminal and all the paths look fine. All characters render correctly in the terminal and in media center.

Is there a way to somehow remap my playlists and ratings if I reimport all of my music ?

 

I don't think there's a good programmatic way to resolve the issue unless all of the malformed letters are the same letter.  If I were you, I would make a library backup (which just backs up the database) and try a fresh import to see if it will work better now that you've fixed your locale to support unicode.
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eagebhart

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Re: special characters and lost files...
« Reply #3 on: July 12, 2016, 01:02:50 pm »


The letters aren't actually malformed.  I did already do an import of the same music folder and it imported perfectly.

So  I know that will work.  I'm thinking about how I could preserve my playlists and ratings.

Ratings are stored in the database, not in the flac files.  Is that correct ?

Since playlists work from the file path, I could export those and then reload them once the import is done.   Or would I even have to do that?
Could I just remove the music in the library and re-import ?  Would the playlists remain ?

If that were the case, I could create playlists for each rating.  Which would then allow me to retag my music after the fresh import.

Does that sound reasonable ?   

Thanks.

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mwillems

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Re: special characters and lost files...
« Reply #4 on: July 12, 2016, 05:13:46 pm »

It's possible that if you reimported them (without removing the broken entries) the import process would fix the broken links and match them with the correct files (the feature is supposed to work that way), but there's no guarantees.  

Make a library backup first and then try running an import with "fix broken links" enabled and see where that gets you; if that doesn't work, you can try just removing the broken links and reimporting to see if that works.  

I don't know if ratings are one of the tags that get written to the files, but you should be able to verify with a 3rd party id3 tag editor.
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