International character problem

[zzzyzygy]

Any folders that have international characters in their name seem to come and go randomly from the list on the left side of the screen. They're either all visible or they're all not.

Whether they are visible or not, the number of artists, albums, etc. does not change, so they're always in the catalog but sometimes not in the list. So this appears to be a display problem.

I have seen quite a few threads about this problem, but none of the suggestions in them have worked for me. I'm using Subsonic 4.0.1 on Ubuntu 10.04. This appears to be a defect. Has anyone found a solution for it?

[zzzyzygy]

Update: International characters in song titles now display properly even when the names are missing from the list at left. They used to appear as question marks when the names at left were missing. I didn't change anything.

This is a very annoying defect because of its random behavior. A significant portion of my music collection may or may not be available at any moment.

[Kirk]

It is also a difficult issue to troubleshoot because it's so intermittent.

Could you take a few cropped screenshots and show us some of the specific characters it's not allowing periodically?

Cheers,
Kirk

[berjanjo]

Hello,
I have the same Problem.
I use Ubuntu 10.4 and the standalone Server,
also use many äöüß & co.
I figured out, If I start Subsonic in auto-start Subsonic is not able
to show äöüß & co, but If I start subsonic manually after boot-up over terminal it works perfect. I tried many ways with "sleep 120" in start script so the Subsonic starts after Boot-up, but it wont work, still no äöü after auto-start.
For now I start subsonic every time manually after Server Re-boot. It is a very very dirty workaround but I don't have to restart my Server very often. Maybe you find a resolution how the Auto-start & ÖÄÜß is working together.

Nice Greetings Björn

[strixx]

Hi,

Just tried out Subsonic and have the same problem.
I run Subsonic on a Ubuntu 10.04 Server Edition.

The problem is when the artist name contains a international character it won't show in the left column. But if a song contains a international character the song shows in the centre frame, with the characters replaced with a question mark.

Could the problem be with different charset used. All my music is transformed from cd to mp3 and aac with WinAmp in Windows.

I had the same problem with file names when I migrated to Linux from Windows, and had to mount my USB-HD with the iocharset=iso8859-1 option to get the right characters. But when then copying all my music onlny the file names became correct, and of course the id3-tag is still with the wrong charset.

I have a similar problem when listing files with international characters with the File Manager in Webmin. This is also a Java program.

When accessing the files over SMB (Samba) it all shows correct. No matter what platform on the client.

So is the problem in what charset Java uses?
Can you change it in Java, like in Python where you only have to ad one row in the beging like

Code: Select all

# -*- coding: iso8859-1 -*-

Anyone with programming skills that would like to check out if I'm on to something?

[delcypher]

http://forum.subsonic.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4063

[strixx]

Thanx, that did half the job, but not all. It fixed the question marks in the centre frame, but there is still one problem left.

I have my music on to different places, so I've added two paths in the settings. If I have the drop down list in the left column showing all music I still can not see artists with international characters in their name. But if I choose only one folder the artists is seen.

This didn't change by adding "export LANG". I could see the international characters in the left column before adding this line, but only if I choose one of the folders containing my music. But if I clicked on one of the artists nothing happened. Now that works. And I get the records in the centre frame, just like it's supposed to do.

But as I wrote earlier. I still can't see artists with international characters in the left column when showing all music.

[mahikeulbody]

But as I wrote earlier. I still can't see artists with international characters in the left column when showing all music.

I confirm that.

[turmoil]

I too can't see any artists with international characters.

[strixx]

This must be a bug.

As I explained above it works fine if you have two or more folders that contains your music. As long as you don't choose to view all folders, then they disappears.

Is there a place to report a bug? I can't find it. Or should I post a topic in the "Feature Requests" part of the forum?

[courtarro]

I'd like to "vote" for this bug. I've tried the en_US.UTF-8 values placed in various configuration files, all to no avail. My problem is the following artist name:

Röyksopp

The funny thing is that this artist showed up in my full file list a few weeks ago. Maybe some Ubuntu setting outside Subsonic is screwing with SS's support of extended characters? Also funny: I can search for "sopp" and the songs show up in the database ... but the artist isn't listed in the left-hand side of the web interface, and it doesn't show up in the Android client's full list. Any ideas?

EDIT

Shortly after posting this message, the problem went away. The most recent change I made was adding the following lines to /etc/init.d/subsonic (immediately following "### END INIT INFO"):

Code: Select all

export LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

To be perfectly open, I had also modified /etc/default/subsonic, adding:

Code: Select all

export LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8

And I tried adding to /usr/share/subsonic/subsonic.sh the following line:

Code: Select all

export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

That's the full documentation of my experimentation, and I'm honestly not sure what ended up working. I do know that I had to restart the server and rebuild the search database after making the change in order for it to take effect ... but which changed worked? Dunno. Will the fix be permanent? Dunno that either.

[bormuff]

I'd not noticed that my index wasn't showing any of Beyoncé, Röyksopp or Sven Väth until I read this thread.

YMMV but all I had to do was this:

Check what my current LANG is:

Code: Select all

$ echo $LANG
en_GB.UTF-8

Open up /etc/default/subsonic and add:

Code: Select all

export LANG=en_GB.UTF-8

before the SUBSONIC_ARGS line.

The I restarted the Subsonic server:

Code: Select all

sudo service subsonic restart

When all was back up, I did a manual Search update and then reloaded the Index panel and hey presto, all the above appeared.

Note: I added the LANG line to /etc/default/subsonic specifically as that is the file you edit to change the default startup options. /etc/init.d/subsonic calls this file first which then calls /usr/bin/subsonic which is just a symlink to /usr/share/subsonic/subsonic.sh so you shouldn't have to add it anywhere else.

It would be useful to know what OS people who have experienced this problem are using. Seems like a good little tip to add to the wiki.

[delcypher]

@bormuff

The reason you're having to do this is because the locale is not setup correctly or the environmental variable for setting the language is not present when the subsonic script runs.

A better (it will use whatever the user has set as their locale language) and more generic version of the command you used for setting language could be the following.

Code: Select all

export $(locale | grep LANG)

I use the stand alone version of Subsonic on Arch linux so I run the shell script to start subsonic manually so it's not a problem.

[jari.j]

I had a similar problem with Ubuntu 10.04 server and WinXP and Android clients, but adding

LC_CTYPE=$LANG
LANG=$LANG

to the beginning of /etc/init.d/subsonic after PATH, DESC, etc. and restarting Subsonic server solved it. No problem whatsoever with åäö any more.

[piethein]

Thank you people! Would be great if the fix for the issue (well, asian characters seem to stay problematic) could be implemented in the packaged software!