Amarok patch for local encoded ID3 tags

[Jeff Mitchell]

On Tuesday 08 April 2008, Chih-Wei Huang wrote:
> Hi Jeff,
> This is my first time to get your reply. Thank you anyway!

Ahh, cool  :-)

> 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.

Totally reasonable, but I believe, if my assumption is correct, that this may 
be a better fix to put into taglib.  My assumption is that the strings we get 
from taglib are supposed to be UTF-8...if that's the case, taglib should be 
doing this conversion...if that's not the case, we should consider doing it 
ourselves with your patch.  Sending me a file would be great, because I can 
check against taglib 1.5, and involve the taglib developers in the discussion 
if I think it's better fixed there.  We've already hit the cutoff to get this 
patch included in 1.4.9 (if it's an Amarok fix) but you guys could either 
keep patching it yourself or take a SVN snapshot from us.

As far as the Eee PC (using Xandros) goes in general, taglib 1.5 is a fairly 
new release, but conversely taglib 1.4 is extremely old...many distributions 
have been running periodic SVN snapshots because of the large number of 
fairly critical fixes since the vanilla 1.4 tarball came out.  My point is 
that even if this is not a fix in taglib 1.5, you guys should consider 
upgrading anyways, and if you are running vanilla 1.4 and not a SVN snapshot, 
you should *absolutely* upgrade (there are a number of bugs in vanilla 1.4 
that can cause corruption of tags and occasionally in certain circumstances 
of files).

If you upgrade to taglib 1.5, you'll also need to upgrade Amarok...but this 
should also be considered, as there are massive numbers of bugfixes since 
1.4.3, and Amazon cover downloading is now broken because of changes to the 
Amazon API, which will be fixed in the soon-to-be-released 1.4.9. See

http://websvn.kde.org/branches/stable/extragear/multimedia/amarok/ChangeLog?revision=795119&view=markup

So to sum it all up...bleeding edge may be bad in a general sense for a 
consumer device, but it's generally a much better idea as far as these two 
packages go  :-)

Say hello to our man Ian Monroe at the Summit!

I'll keep an eye out for your test file.

Thanks,
Jeff