utf-8 and ISO-8859-1 craziness - gentoo linux and rockbox 3.2

[aussieguy]

Hi Everyone, I have been struggling with this problem for some time now. I think I have tried everything possible and still can't get things working.

What is happening is that if I encode the mp3s using utf-8 then the only way I can see the french characters during playback is by using the ISO-8859-1 codepage. Which I find to be strange.

I'm using gentoo and previously was using the ISO-8859-15 codepage. I have changed everything over to utf-8, run an env-update, rebooted.

locale gives me this.

LANG=en_US.utf8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.utf8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.utf8"
LC_TIME="en_US.utf8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.utf8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.utf8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.utf8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.utf8"
LC_NAME="en_US.utf8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.utf8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.utf8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.utf8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.utf8"
LC_ALL=en_US.utf8

After this was changed, I re-emerged lame (the mp3 encoder), re-emerge k3b (the CD ripping program), and even re-emerged glibc (the C libraries).

Still after all this, when I encoded mp3s only codepage ISO-8859-1 would show the french characters correctly. If I used codepage UTF-8 then the french characters like éèê, etc appear as blank boxes.

I tried the ripping program called grip. There is even an option to select UTF-8 to encode the ID3 tags. This option was obviously chosen.

Still the same problem, choosing UTF-8 shows blank boxes for the accented characters, and only ISO-8859-1 shows the characters correctly.

I know this is not the "end of the world" and obviously I can still listen to music.

It just seems so strange that only ISO-8859-1 shows the characters correctly.

I have also upgraded from rockbox version r17041-080408 to the latest rockbox 3.2, with similar results.

I am using a sansa e280.

What do I do !
I'm going crazy ....

Thanks Everyone

[soap]

I recently had an issue where the tagger I was using, despite my commands, was only writing ID3 v2.4 UTF-8 in new fields.  Despite issuing a "rewrite all fields" command, it was ignoring me and keeping most of my tags in v2.3 ISO.
My symptoms were identical to what you are describing.

A couple of thoughs.
1 - locale has nothing to do with your tags, and IIUC will only affect how the filenames are written. 
2 - You really need to check what your tagger is doing.
3 - If you are using MP3, to the best of my knowledge ID3 v2.3 only supports UTF-16 and v2.4 supports UTF-8 and UTF-16.

[aussieguy]

A couple of thoughs.
1 - locale has nothing to do with your tags, and IIUC will only affect how the filenames are written. 
2 - You really need to check what your tagger is doing.
3 - If you are using MP3, to the best of my knowledge ID3 v2.3 only supports UTF-16 and v2.4 supports UTF-8 and UTF-16.

What is even stranger is that previously I was using Mandriva. In regards to the mp3s I ripped under Mandriva all the ID3 tags are only seen correctly when I select codepage of UTF-8 under Rockbox.

With Mandriva ripped mp3s selecting codepage of ISO-8859-1 will show the accented characters as garbage.

It is strange that in grip, there is only a choice of using ID3 version 1 or 2.

After a bit of poking around I installed EasyTAG under gentoo and it fixed all of my problems.

In EasyTAG under preferences I am able to save ID3 v1 and v2 tags at the same time, I am also able to specify v2.4 or v2.3 for the v2 preference.

Also in EasyTAG you can open  up multiple mp3 at a time and modify them en-masse.

So with the the EasyTAG-ed mp3s I can see the french accented characters with either codepage UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1.

This makes me very happy, heaven has smiled on my endeavours.

Thanks for you help !