I am running 42.3 with KDE Desktop and tagging my music files with EasyTag. AFAIK I am using UTF-8 character set on the desktop this machine. (Where is it set and how can I check)
EasyTag is set to write ID3v2.4 tags using Unicode UTF8.
Once correctly tagged the files are uploaded to a NAS form whence they are served by minimserver to lan.
Many of my music directories, file titles (and tags) have names which have diacritical marks for example:-
Abélard: Hymns & sequences for Héloïse (Schola Gregoriana of Cambridge)
This particular disk caused a problem and when I looked at the minimserver log (on a windoze machine) I found the directory name has become:-
If I look at the files in the NAS using browser all is correct and as it should be.
I shall be taking this up with minimserver author but I would like to understand more about what is going on and how to correct this issue. Can anybody help please?
It depends of course on how you connect to the NAS. When this is using Linux protocol (in short NFS), it should have no problems with file names in UTF-8, because the NAS itself would have a Linux (and thus UTF-8) compatible file system. When the NAS uses some exotic MS Windows based file system and protocol, there might be problems as you encounter.
Hi Henk and thanks for the reply. The NAS runs on linux and I transfer the files with rsync. I cannot work out where the issue is arising unless the NAS system, in deference to the windoze market, has been “broken” to suit windoze standards. Will post if/when I learn from minimserver author.
After writing this a kind soul replied to my query on minimserver site drawing my attention to the extensive minimserver manual and in particular:-
MinimServer recognizes the following filetypes as playlists:
.m3u
Standard or extended M3U playlists using the Windows-1252 or ISO 8859-1 character set
.m3u8
Standard or extended M3U playlists using the UTF-8 character set
Never heard of .m3u8 before but added the 8 to the extension of the problem playlist file and all is now well as far as the log is concerned. Will check playing is OK but assume all in now fixed.
I did not know anything about the m3u or m3u8 files, but you can find more info on the internet.
I am a bit flabbergasted. What has a NAS to to with the contents of a file? IMHO it should just store in sequence the bytes that belong to a file to be found back under the file name given. The system that uses the files in the end should interpret all that information and may draw conclusions out of the fact that the file name has a suffix of some form (and in Unix/Linux, that is not even the system, but some applications do). The NAS should show no “intelligence” at all, only store.
Hi Henk,
I understand and agree but it is not the NAS function but the software that sits on the NAS, in this case minimserver, which reads the files and serves them to the lan.
It is also possible that the problem only manifests itself in the logs from the control software running on a windoze machine where logs are created. In other words the errors were artifacts of the logging system and not errors in the function of the server. No time to research further just now.
Thanks for your help and advice.
Budge
All fine, but my underlying remark was that you only referred to a NAS and never to other functionality in that box that meddles with the contents. A slight hint to try to inform others more complete when describing a situation.
