Tracks with unicode characters in M3U playlists won't load

[abr99]

Setup:

Here's a subset of tracks from one of my playlists. It's an M3U playlist.

Code: Select all

D:\Music\Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young\Déjà Vu\01 Carry On.mp3
D:\Music\Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young\Deja Vu\02 Teach Your Children Déjà.mp3
D:\Music\Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young\Deja Vu\03 Almost Cut My Hair.mp3

The first track contains accented characters in the folder name. The second contains accented characters in the file name. The third has these characters converted to non-accented versions.

Problem:

When I load the playlist in Subsonic, the first two songs will not be loaded. The third plays fine.

Other notes:

I use Windows 7 64bit.

I'm certain that the paths and file names are accurate. If I copy and paste one of the accented paths into the address bar of Windows Explorer the file opens fine in my default MP3 player, Media Player Classic.

I've been messing with the paths and names for this test. Ideally the path would be the same as the album name, Déjà Vu. Track 2 isn't supposed to have Déjà in the name. That was just for testing.

All of these tracks play fine through Subsonic's artist/album browser, on Android and in Firefox. They only fail to load from playlists, and fail on both Android and in Firefox. So I figure the server itself is messing up.

[alphawave7]

My understanding was that m3u originally only supported latin charset, not unicode (accents,etc.). There is m3u8 playlist extension to cope, but only certain players are optimised to detect and use it, and I'm unsure if Subsonic's player can (I deleted all the accents from my collection long ago). Test, and if not, request the m3u8 feature. G'luck!

[loomer]

I was searching the forums for exactly the same issue that the OP described. My .m3u playlists that I've exported out of iTunes will load in the Subsonic web player, but none of the tracks with unicode (UTF? Are those two things the same?) characters in them simply do not load with the rest of the playlist contents.

The odd thing is that the unicode-tagged tracks play fine if I navigate to the album and select the song that way. I simply cannot get them saved in a playlist.

I tried exporting a few .m3u8 playlists and loading those in the web player, but no dice. The .m3u8 playlists didn't show up in the page of playlists to load into the web player.

I guess I'll cook up a post in the requests section, unless anyone has come across a solution to this problem that doesn't require me to go crying to the dev team :]

[jarome]

I have this too with the latest server. For example, the album
"Götterdämmerung; Cheryl Studer, Andrea Gruber, Etc., James Levine; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra & Chorus"
works perfectly in my Squeezebox Server, but is absent from Subsonic.

I have many of these since I have a large classical collection. How do I get them to get indexed by Subsonic on OpenSURE 11.4?
Redoing all the names is not an option with over 40,000 tracks.

[BKKKPewsey]

Jarome: Is your question about m3u playlists as the thread title or search indexing?

If anyone has the problem of saving & loading playlists with accented characters, I would suggest they try to save them in xspf format which appears to work ok (on windows at least)