Amarok patch for local encoded ID3 tags

[Chih-Wei Huang]

Hi Jeff,
This is my first time to get your reply. Thank you anyway!

The problem that my patch tried to fix is, many mp3 files
don't encoded id3 tags in UTF-8, but in their local encoding,
e.g., Big5 for traditional Chinese.

My patch tries to detect whether if the tags are valid UTF-8 strings.
If not, assume they are encoded in the local encoding according to
the locale setting. For example, suppose the locale is zh_TW.UTF-8,
then assume the tags are encoded in Big5, the local encoding of zh_TW,
if they are not valid UTF-8 strings.
This is just a fallback workaround.
However, it works for most situations.

Though I fixed the problem primarily for Eee PC,
I did see the problem also appear in other distributions
I've tried like Debian/Fedora, which ship with even newer amarok.
Actually the patch applied to 1.4.3 as well as to 1.4.8.

I don't know whether if the newest Taglib has fix the issue.
I guess not.

If you need, I can send you such a file when I'm back home.
(I'm participating Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit now)


Chih-Wei

Jeff Mitchell:
> Trying one more time...Chin-Wei, did you receive this?
> 
> Jeff Mitchell wrote:
>> Chih-Wei--
>>
>> After looking at this patch and our code, I'm having a little trouble 
>> understanding why you're running into this problem in the first 
>> place...the strings we get from TagLib should be UTF-8 already.
>>
>> Is it possible for you to send a sample file to me that exhibits this 
>> behavior?  I'd like to test it with more recent versions of Amarok and 
>> TagLib (I can see that you are using 1.4.3 on the Eee and I'm guessing 
>> some snapshot or stock TagLib 1.4...lots of bugs have been fixed in 
>> both applications since then).  Even if it doesn't work here it may 
>> turn out that the proper place for a fix is in TagLib.