Why Not UNICODE ??

[tokiee]

WinAMP cannot LOAD any files that have unicode character set in its name!! let alone SHOWING these names

i've searched articles by 'unicode' keyword, and many were already reported that problem, but i think the developer seems to MISUNDERSTAND the point of it.

IT'S NOT /WHY CAN'T I "SEE" UNICODE CHARACTER/
IT'S /WHY CAN'T I EVEN "LOAD" THE FILE WITH UNICODE/

so it can't be helped by unicode support FONTS or something

Support for multi-language / international Unicode fonts in filenames:
Tixoft Font Plug 11
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?threadid=60931 (Tixoft Plugin + Windows fonts)
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread....threadid=58969 (more of the same)
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?threadid=51293 (general workarounds/fixes)
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?threadid=60931 (Regional Control Panel)
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?threadid=61102 (Proof it works for some)
Forum Search : keywords = unicode | international characters | language | etc

[tokiee]

HEY MAN!! YOU DON'T EVEN LISTEN TO ME

I SAD, "IT CAN'T BE HELPED BY THAT!!!"

IT'S NOT ABOUT FONT!!
IT'S ABOUT LOADING UNICODE FILE



Support for multi-language / international Unicode fonts in filenames:
Tixoft Font Plug 11
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?threadid=60931 (Tixoft Plugin + Windows fonts)
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread...&threadid=58969 (more of the same)
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?threadid=51293 (general workarounds/fixes)
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?threadid=60931 (Regional Control Panel)
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?threadid=61102 (Proof it works for some)
Forum Search : keywords = unicode | international characters | language | etc

[peter]

this can't be fixed in winamp v2.x because of limitations in input plugin architecture. please shut up and wait for final winamp3.
also, changing regional settings does help.

[tokiee]

i have both of wmp2.77 and wmp3

and since the winamp has borne until now, any version (including upcoming v3) of winamp doesn't support multilanguage ,,

AND

sure, it does help some by regional settings in contol panel,

BUT it's not complete

for example, in japanese they re using long dash (not ASCII small dash character), sorry i can't show it on this (though i can write it directly now, you may not recognize it), and any file that have this letter in its name, can't be loaded into winamp

winamp continues to try to load that file but failed and failed again infinitely

windows media player can play it, but i'm a winamp lover

Unicode support is not in Beta1, but it should be in before the final relase. I remember Brennan mentioning as earily as Beta2.

[peter]

i've made it sticky because it is pissing me off. too many people are using win2k/xp these days. i can't even open a playlist with unicode characters (in both WA2 and WA3b1).
mods: please merge any new threads about unicode with this one when i'm away (just to keep the forum clean).
PS. i have an idea how to fix it in wa2 with relatively little mess on input plugin side (use UTF-8 internally everywhere, assume plugins with IN_VER=0x100 to not support unicode and convert filenames to regular multibyte before passing to them, pass UTF-8 filenames to updated plugins (IN_VER=0x101), to simplify shit write fopen() wrappers that do UTF-8 and work on both NT and non-NT, etc), maybe Justin will read this and start fixing shit.

[ziip]

ohh, so this is why winamp can't play files like this:

AC⁄DC - Song Title.mp3

but most micro$oft apps doesn't seem to have this problem.
ie: notepad & mediaplayer.

Can't wait till Winamp will be able to play Unicode named files

[NeoRenegade]

WTF kind of crackhead would put a slash in a filename?!
Jeeesus... people have no respect for older OS's, taking new OS's advantages for granted left and right and then bitching that we don't keep up with the buggy sons of guns...

[peter]

neo, plz, don't flame at sticky threads, this is a really serious problem and we'll be getting more and more people bitching about it as winxp (and ntfs) spreads. hope Justin will read this.

[NeoRenegade]

I have absolutely no qualm with people who just want to load MP3's in their own language.

But an english filename with a slash?

[ziip]

lol..ain't you funny? it's not like i'm not gonna share my files with you..neo. the slash on my filenames don't pose any threat to you.

[peter]

this is not just a problem with weird mp3 filenames. i can't even load a playlist with foreign characters in filename. that's really annoying.

[A Plugin Developer]

Originally posted by peter
PS. i have an idea how to fix it in wa2 with relatively little mess on input plugin side (use UTF-8 internally everywhere, assume plugins with IN_VER=0x100 to not support unicode and convert filenames to regular multibyte before passing to them, pass UTF-8 filenames to updated plugins (IN_VER=0x101), to simplify shit write fopen() wrappers that do UTF-8 and work on both NT and non-NT, etc), maybe Justin will read this and start fixing shit.

peter,
It can definitely be fixed... I made a similar work-around for ShoutAmp in order to see international characters in Shoutcast title streams.

[peter]

only Justin is working on Winamp2's main exe now (i don't even have the source code), and it's kinda difficult to convince him to fix anything these days (AFAIK he reads all the buglist crap).

[Dominic]

I have tried Winamp3 beta 2.5 but it still can not display Asian characters (Unicode characters) in the "Song Title" but it can display Asian characters in the playlist.

Display of Asian Characters in the Song Title is also not possible in Winamp 2.78c but it IS possible in 2.34.

Originally posted by tokiee
i have both of wmp2.77 and wmp3

and since the winamp has borne until now, any version (including upcoming v3) of winamp doesn't support multilanguage ,,

AND

sure, it does help some by regional settings in contol panel,

BUT it's not complete

for example, in japanese they re using long dash (not ASCII small dash character), sorry i can't show it on this (though i can write it directly now, you may not recognize it), and any file that have this letter in its name, can't be loaded into winamp

winamp continues to try to load that file but failed and failed again infinitely

windows media player can play it, but i'm a winamp lover

[peter]

WA3 doesn't support unicode yet.
display of international characters isn't the main problem here (make sure that you have disabled "use bitmap font in title display" option...); it is totally impossible to play files with filenames containing international characters in winnt.
now, Justin, WHERE ARE YOU ? have you even read all this ? add utf8 shit in WA2 exe, change IN_VER, then i'll quickly hack all my input plugins and everything will be fine.
from the other side - we aren't the only ones having this problem (irfanview pukes on unicode filenames too. blah.).

[cristofer8]

As was mentioned, I'm having problems with Winamp 2.78 and unicode also. I don't use any international chars, but since I'm using winxp pro, it puts unicode into them. Winamp truncates the last character of each ID3v2 field. Example:

file: Greenday - Waiting.mp3
According to winamp:
id3v1 title: Waiting
id3v1 artist: Greenday
id3v2 title: Waitin
id3v2 artist: Greenda
Scrolling Text: 83. GREENDA - WAITIN (3:13)

Windows Media Player displays the info perfectly, and even explorer can display it flawlessly, in the shell itself. I have no idea if windows is using id3v1 or 2 (I suspect 2) but it still works correctly. So my assumption is that general unicode support sucks, but especially id3v2 unicode support. And yes, the files are stored on an ntfs partition, and are played in both winamp and wmp.

When ID3v2 tags are in unicode the last character is truncated. Known bug.

[Wish]

Winamp 2.79:
* fix to id3v2+unicode support (rOn)



Hopefully this ends all the endless bug reports/complaints about UNICODE support once and for all.

[A Plugin Developer]

Originally posted by Wish
Winamp 2.79:
* fix to id3v2+unicode support (rOn)



Hopefully this ends all the endless bug reports/complaints about UNICODE support once and for all.

Not quite. As I understand it, this fix is only for Unicode support in the tag itself and has nothing to do with the filename. FULL unicode support is what people want... although the id3 tag is a good start.

[peter]

wish: that only fixes id3v2 on xp-tagged mp3s (um, "rOn fixed it", looks like i'll remain the silent hero of /query wars)

[Wish]

Ok, my bad.

The thing is, only NT4/Win2k/WinXP provides full Unicode support, the 9x line of OSes do not support Unicode fully.

Been reading the MSDN docs that was installed when I installed Visual Studio .Net, I feel like a real programming geek now(still can't code or write any programs though).

[A Plugin Developer]

Originally posted by Wish
Ok, my bad.

The thing is, only NT4/Win2k/WinXP provides full Unicode support, the 9x line of OSes do not support Unicode fully.

Been reading the MSDN docs that was installed when I installed Visual Studio .Net, I feel like a real programming geek now(still can't code or write any programs though).

Okay, now that you have some documentation, look up this api: MultiByteToWideChar

[A Plugin Developer]

Originally posted by peter
wish: that only fixes id3v2 on xp-tagged mp3s (um, "rOn fixed it", looks like i'll remain the silent hero of /query wars)

Do I hear an echo in here? HAHA Face it Peter until Justin or whoever gives you (or anyone else who cares) the code to Winamp this problem will never get fixed because the only people that seem to care about this problem are those that require multiple languages... and unless pig latin counts for a second language Justin probably won't ever experience this bug himself.

P.S. How much they pay you for those input plugins anyway? ... hopefully not chump-change.

[peter]

looks like the next release (v2.8 ?) will have a partial input-plugin-side fix for that.

[peter]

PARTIAL FIX FOR MP3s WITH UNICODE FILENAMES (may or may not work)

[peter]

unstuck, v2.80 is on the download server, most of input plugins (including in_mp3 and in_vorbis) have the fix for unicode filenames, should behave fine unless you use chineese or similar everywhere.
"replacement" mp3 plugins (MAD & mp3pro) will be obviously still broken, but that's another story.

[A Plugin Developer]

Originally posted by peter
should behave fine unless you use chineese or similar everywhere.

Not much of a fix if it doesn't work for Chinese. Actually, I am playing files with 'Chinese everywhere' as you put it... under Winamp v2.79. Previously I tried this 'Chinese' playback test under XP (Japanese ver) and it failed... now under Win2K (U.S. ver) it is working??? The only thing I can think of that may have caused it to work is that I've got about every font imaginable installed on this machine... installed 'em all back when I wrote ShoutAmp and needed to test stuff. Anyway, are you posting your fix for other input plugin developers so that all plugins may support unicode properly?

[peter]

hehehehe, evil me, this "fix" will make most of you rotflmao, i couldn't stop laughing for long time after i wrote it. it's as stupid as hell, it uses FindFile hacks to guess original working filenames from crippled multibyte string we got; works amazingly well though.
sourcecode here:
http://www.blorp.com/~peter/unipoop.txt (for use only on NT when you can't open some file using regular CreateFile/whatever)

[Wish]

Peter's plugins, they really whip the llama's asses.....

[OCedHrt]

I can play chinese files in WinXP with English set in regional optionals. And, I have tags in unicode, but winamp can display them with characters as if they were under the Chinese codepage (950). Does this not mean that winamp can read unicode? And thus translate it into non-unicode? I don't know how any of this works, so yeah :P
Anyways, just saying that the new plug-ins does allow playback of Chinese unicode filenames, and i have Chinese, Japanese, and English everywhere :P

[peter]

correct unicode display will never work right in winamp v2.x, fixing it would require too many internal changes and killing current input plugin specs. this will be hopefully fixed in next winamp3 release.

[scmasaru]

It choked on playlist too.
It's expected... so better make winamp to be able to read unicode playlist too.

[Nealo]

I have winamp 2.81, and I spent hours a few monthsa go trying to figure why international fonts (mostly Japanese characters) weren't displaying correctly in the playlist. I just found out (when I accidentally clicked on a new skin), my problem was with skins. Arial, used by many skins and as winamp's base (I think) doesn't support Japanese characters. I suggest openning up a skin with winzip or the like, openning pledit.txt, and changing the font to one that you know works for the language you want, just to test. For Japanese, Tahoma works. If you don't have a pledit.txt in the skin, make one, and put this in it:

[text]
Font=Tahoma

You can change the font of any skin you have, to make it compatible. All the skins I have that don't look bad use Ariel, so I was lucky that I hadn't deleted all the bad ones and accidentally clicked on it today. I also found that putting something that isn't a font works for Japanese, but still looks like Arial for English... weird.

I am using win2k, and songs show up in Japnese in the playlist and everything. Cozzer's last post at http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?threadid=60931 explains what may need to be done to get it to work. Because I wanted to be able to read Japanese filenames (and copy them to my hard drive - stupid windows), I had already done everything Cozzer says - maybe you won't have to resort to such extreme measures as setting it to your default language. For Japanese, this causes '\' to look like a yen symbol, and aparently it's used for the currency symbol in other languages too. Some characters on webpages screw up for me too, but I'm used to it now.

[stildripin]

Well, this is how I use unicode filenames in winamp 3.

I have installed winamp3 with the internationalisation option checked.

I use unitagger 1.1 to create an ID3v2 tag in Greek, and then I rename the files to unicode using the multiple rename feature.

I then load the file into a winamp playlist, since there is an id3v2 tag in there, winamp3 gets a title, artist name ... with lots of question marks, so I right click all the files in the playlist and press "Delete info from main library", and winamp3 can display the fonts in Greek! I have tested this on Windows 2000, I don't know what the behavior would be on windows 98/ME, both of which don't natively support unicode strings.

Maybe installing the .NET framework onto win 98/ME will solve this problem.

I have also noticed that windows media player can read id3v2 tags with unicode, as well as unicode filenames, but winamp3 can't parse those tags, and I think that this is in the process of being created, if anybody is interested in creating such a component for winamp3, please send me a message.


Greetz

[Nealo]

Well, I don't know about you, but that sounds pretty convoluted to me, for a program that was planning on having this support a while back (I think). I have 4k mp3s, and maybe a few hundred of them are in Japanese. Who has the time to create tags for all of them (no offense, of course)? I barely have time to sleep/eat... wait, that's another topic altogether.

Also, I guess maybe I would have been more motivated to do that if I used winamp3, as unicode filenames in winamp2 didn't work anyway (until I changed the skin). But I uninstalled winamp3 (non-beta) a few hours after I installed it. All the old options had dissapeared - I couldn't customize things the way I could before.

Anyway, I hope they put support for unicode id3 tags in winamp3 soon (for others' sake) - winamp2 works with unicode id3.

Anyway, I'm pretty happy about winamp in general, and it's what I always use. I guess you just can't please everyone all the time.

Nealo

[pellepelokas]

I have ogg vorbis files with finnish letters in the filename and the tag. Everytime winamp2 comes across a special letter ä or ö it forgets the letter and everything coming after it.

I read through everything I could find conserning this in the message bords. I hope I am not getting into someting that has bee adressed here. The thing that is bugging me is that I can manually re-type the tags with the special chars and it will work but it doesn't work when winamp sees them the first time.

Any tips would be appreciated. Thx.

[praise4him]

This is another story, but,
I'm using Windows with Korean char-set and I have almost no problem with winamp, playing Korean Songs, Japanese Songs and Songs with Chinese characters. But I have one problem while using media library.
When I click the title, "File name" or "Artist", to sort by those categories, I don't get the proper action from it. All the English-named files are sorted well, but my language names files are not sorted properly inserted everywhere among English-named files, unsorted. Artist sort have the same problem, too.
I hope that it would be fixed, 'cause now Winamp is more like an universal program for every peoples.

[OCedHrt]

Yes, because Korean encompasses both Chinese and Japanese characters. The sorting issue though, is because it is still sorting on a single-byte basis. So although you see the character, it might actually be A^ or something and precede B-titled songs.