Some insight into problems with importing .m3u playlists -

[DaveGoodrich]

I have been trying to import some .m3u playlists of .mp3 files into STV. Some have imported, but most didn't. Searching these forums, I found that others have had similar problems. I turned on the debug logging, and was able to track down what is causing my particular problem.

STV apparently won't import a playlist if it references ANY files with international characters in their names. For example, my debug log file contains the line:

"Thu 1/3 23:36:18.865 Ignoring playlist: M:\Latino-Afro-Carribean.m3u due to missing element: M:\Latin\Buena Vista Social Club\Buena Vista Social Club\06_¿Y Tú Qué Has Hecho_Buena Vista Social Club_Buena Vista Social Club.mp3"

STV is misinterpreting the file name, because in the file system, and in the M3U file, the file name actually reads "06_¿Y Tú Qué Has Hecho_Buena Vista Social Club_Buena Vista Social Club.mp3". In other words, STV reads "¿Y Tú Qué Has Hecho" as "¿Y Tú Qué Has Hecho" and therefore thinks the file doesn't exist and aborts the import of the entire list.

What is funny is that STV has no problem importing the file itself into the music library. I can find it under the Artist, Album, Genre etc. The filename displays properly in the "Song Detail" dialog, and the file plays just fine. So, in general, STV doesn't have a problem with international characters, only the import routine.

Is there a way to get STV to read the international characters properly?

In any case, wouldn't it be more desirable for STV to just ignore the "missing" file, and import the rest of the files in the M3U? What am I missing?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated (other than renaming my files).

[Brent]

I can't help out here other than to say I've had issues importing music playlists as well. I can say it has problems importing almost any playlist and I can't find a rhyme or reason to it. Some import and some don't. I have a m3u playlist called test.m3u with two songs on it and it won't import and then I have another named test2 with the same two songs on it and it does import.

I just haven't had the time to investigate further.

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by DaveGoodrich

ISTV is misinterpreting the file name, because in the file system, and in the M3U file, the file name actually reads "06_¿Y Tú Qué Has Hecho_Buena Vista Social Club_Buena Vista Social Club.mp3". In other words, STV reads "¿Y Tú Qué Has Hecho" as "¿Y Tú Qué Has Hecho" and therefore thinks the file doesn't exist and aborts the import of the entire list.

Actually my suspicion would be that the character encoding used in the M3U (looks like multibyte encoding) is different from the encoding used in the filesystem (probably Unicode), and that's why the filenames don't match. Whatever you're using to view the contents of the M3U (Notepad or whatever) understands the multibyte encoding and displays it properly, but that doesn't mean the underlying representation is the same.

So the problem is not that Sage is garbling the characters, but that it's not un-garbling them properly. That would be my guess, at least.

Either way, it seems like a bug, and you should probably submit a bug report on it.