Foreign characters in filenames and tags

[digitalpan]

Hi, first post here and a problem only partially solved. I've just started running VortexBox on a Dell Optiplex tower box. Version 1.9 loaded fine, the Dell is running headless and I'm able to connect to the VortexBox across my network with Safari and see the files in Finder from my Mac Pro.

The audio from the Dell is connected to some cheap PC speakers just for testing, and I've also got an iPod Touch running iPeng Player as a remote device. I decided to start slowly and load a few CDs and check the rips, artwork, track names etc., as I wanted to prove the concept and learn how to deal with unknowns.

Air, Allman Bros, Apollo 440, Arcade Fire, Joan Armatrading, Beatles, Blind Faith, all fine (yes, I know, alphabetical order!) but when it came to the album Debut by Bjork . . . well, the CD ripped ok, the artwork was correct, but the Squeezebox Server went crazy when I tried to play it. It played the first few seconds of the first track, then jumped to another track, seemingly at random, and again a few seconds, then jumped again. No sound at all. But mysteriously I could play the album perfectly from iPeng Player. I ripped another Bjork album, Post, and similar things happened. Then I ripped a Tracy Chapman album, and it played ok but appeared with Bjork's artwork! Needless to say I tried multiple rescans, but with no success.

Then in desperation a Google search turned up a problem copying a Bjork music file on a Linux box, caused by the foreign character o with two dots above (called diaeresis or umlaut) that is in Bjork's name (I thought it best not to try to type that here). So I renamed all the relevant folders and files changing it to a plain o, and also changed all the relevant tags - and bingo, it plays fine. But now of course the artwork has gone as the media databases have Bjork spelt with the foreign character!

Can anyone suggest a way of dealing with this, or is there a setting buried in Fedora that can handle this? Any suggestions gratefully received!

[andrew]

You can leave the character is the ID3 tags that way it will show up correctly in your playlists etc. But renaming the file like you did was a good solution.

[avalx]

I have a lot of foreign chars (even umlauts) in filenames and tags and never had such problems, for example all this works well:

*

*Esbjörn Svensson Trio

Cheikh N'Digel Lô

Chico Science & Naç?o Zumbi

and even this from Prince (to my suprise) :

Sign ? the Times (disc 1)*

Sign ? the Times (disc 2)

Maybe the problem is with your locale Linux setting? My setting is en_US.UTF-8.