Unicode support

[mattschuette]

Does anyone know Insignia's track record on Unicode support? I have lots of music with special chars (Scandinavian, Eastern European, etc.) in the tags and the Pilot butchers them. Do any of the other Insignia players handle this? Do I need some other encoding besides (I assume) UTF-8?

[CrowdAds]

[Trunk666]

Mine handled hiragana just fine if that's what you mean? I ripped it on a Mac with iTunes, but to a PC formatted (NTFS I think?) hard drive if that matters.

Beyoncé comes out as Beyonc*rectangle*
and Luis Bonfá comes out as Luis Bonfß or something.

[mattschuette]

Originally Posted by Trunk666

Mine handled hiragana just fine if that's what you mean? I ripped it on a Mac with iTunes, but to a PC formatted (NTFS I think?) hard drive if that matters.

Specifically German umlauted vowels, es-zet, Swedish/Norwegian a with ring... accented Latin glyphs. I'm using Ogg Vorbis converted from MP3 (yeah yeah) in Foobar2000. The MP3s have ID3v2.4 unicode tags as written by fb2k. Also, the file names are unicode, which Windows XP is perfectly happy with.

Originally Posted by Trunk666

Beyoncé comes out as Beyonc*rectangle*
and Luis Bonfá comes out as Luis Bonfß or something.

See, that seems like a glitch. For example, Metsatöll - Velekeseq Noorõkõsõq comes out as Metsat ¶ll - Velekeseq Noor µk µs µq.

[Trunk666]

Hmm, both came off my Mac. I wonder if that makes a difference. I know I've had problems with bands like Sigur Ros, µ-ziq, and such when transferring them back and forth.

[mattschuette]

Ok, so I have now tried Vorbis Comment which should be UTF-8, ID3v2.4 UTF-8 encoded (as written from Foobar2000), ID3v2.3 UTF-16 (from mp3tag) and ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1 (also mp3tag) and none of those work any differently from the others. Interestingly, my file names all use the same special characters, which WinXP shows just fine, and in the folder browser on the Pilot THAT shows them just fine! I'm also wondering if ID3v2.x is even supported, since a few things showed up Unknown in the library as I was playing around. Anyone have any better luck?

[Trunk666]

I did some experimenting last night, and noticed some things that kind of mimic what you're saying.

XP can read the tags just fine when you're browsing the files on the Pilot in Windows Explorer.

It's only when I "sync" up to the Pilot in Media Mode with MediaMonkey (or WMP, IIRC) that the tags look as they do in the Pilot's GUI. I assume this is because the Pilot is basically telling the sync program what it has on it... and obviously, it can't interpret certain characters properly.

[mattschuette]

Just following up... I have since gotten the Pilot to work with all of my tags. Seems you need to use MTP mode for the transfers. I did call tech support and they were, surprisingly, not at all helpful and chalked it up to "sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't". Also, I've noticed that Winamp 5.5 beta will correctly sync images named "cover.jpg" which is a huge bonus! It creates %album%.alb files that seem to be just renamed JPGs, but I think there is some MTP magic going on as well. Winamp 5.35 did not sync cover art. Transfer time does seem a little slower with MTP, but not unbearable.

Side note, my encoding may be funky (locale specific, not Unicode) because my Linux box does not understand the names of the files on my NTFS share via Samba.

[Trunk666]

Originally Posted by mattschuette

Just following up... I have since gotten the Pilot to work with all of my tags. Seems you need to use MTP mode for the transfers.

That's fantastic. Thanks for the update. I think part of my problem was that I transferred files using File and Folder mode. For some reason it wasn't almost using MTP mode. Now most of my problems have been solved. Typically what shows up in Media Monkey will show up on the Pilot. I'm still having title, character and cover art problems here and there. I've figured out ways around them, but I haven't figured out why they happen.

Originally Posted by mattschuette

Also, I've noticed that Winamp 5.5 beta will correctly sync images named "cover.jpg" which is a huge bonus! It creates %album%.alb files that seem to be just renamed JPGs, but I think there is some MTP magic going on as well. Winamp 5.35 did not sync cover art. Transfer time does seem a little slower with MTP, but not unbearable.

That's good news too. So are you saying that it will sync the JPG file along with the mp3s it sends over? Or are you saying it will include the JPG in the MP3 files you send over? Either way, it sounds like it's being smart about it.

I read in the NS-DV forum that if the file tags don't match, it will cause problems, especially character issues. I remember in Macamp (or maybe it was Winamp) I was able to see two sets of tags for each file. I need to look into this. MediaMonkey allows you to clear one or both.

[mattschuette]

Originally Posted by Trunk666

That's good news too. So are you saying that it will sync the JPG file along with the mp3s it sends over? Or are you saying it will include the JPG in the MP3 files you send over?

Looks like it's just including the cover.jpg file as, for instance from Eisbrecher's sophomore album Antikörper... "Antikörper (Limited Edition).alb". While in MTP mode, the files appear as 0 byte files. On the references tab (Properties window in XP) it lists all songs on the album as references. In MSC mode, I have copied the .alb files off, renamed to .jpg, and they are valid JPG files (120x120, I think). Winamp must be able to query device capabilities and send the right info along.

[Trunk666]

So I got "µ-ziq" to work now. When viewing the tags on the player, it was "a-ziq." When I dragged the file off of the player, it was correct. I had to go in and reapply the tag, then drag the file back onto the Pilot. I've had some trouble with track numbers and file names too. They appear fine in Windows and other programs, but the Pilot rejects them. I really wish I knew what Windows was doing when it was modifying the tags. I have a feeling it's synchronizing all possible tags in the file, or deleting all but one set.