Strange Slashes in Artist Names

[Can Berk Güder]

Exaile displays, in the artist list, strange slash characters for some tracks.

For example, I have only one album from the band Evergrey in my library, but it's split between two artists in the left pane, namely "Evergrey" and "Evergrey / / / / / / / / / / / / / /".

The album's name is "In Search of Truth," but under the artist "Evergrey / / / / / / / / / / / / / /" it displays as "In Search of Truth / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /".

I believe this is somehow a Unicode issue, but I'm not really sure.

[Louis Simard (louis-simard-deactivatedaccount)]

To reproduce this bug, I obtained a file from a friend of mine and added it to an Exaile playlist, then saw that it exhibited this bug. Then, I reduced its size to fit better on Launchpad and give the developers an idea of what kind of file can generate this output. Basically, this is just the ID3 tag at the start of the file, with a half-second of silence :) (Hooray for KHexEdit!)

Next attachment contains a screenshot of the resulting playlist display.

[Louis Simard (louis-simard-deactivatedaccount)]

Changed from New to Confirmed after having found a suitable test case.

[reacocard (reacocard)]

a quick check with mutagen-inspect reveals the problem:

$ mutagen-inspect halfsecond.mp3
-- halfsecond.mp3
- MPEG 1 layer 3, 104112 bps, 44100 Hz, 0.06 seconds (audio/mp3)
TDRC=2003
TIT2=Recycled Air / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /
TRCK=5
TPE1=The Postal Service / / / / / / / / / / /
TALB=Give Up / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /
TCON=Indie

what's happening here is there are multiple null bytes after the tag value. however, null bytes are using in id3 to separate multiple values for the same tag, so when we split on the null character, we get a lot of blank records. thus there are two bugs here:

1) whatever made these tags needs to not insert so many null bytes needlessly
2) exaile needs to ignore null values in considering multiple tags

2 is already fixed in the 0.3-devel branch, so I'm considering the exaile end of this closed. is you know what the file was encoded with, please file a bug report against it requesting that they change this behavior.

as an interim workaround, re-saving the tags using a non-broken tag editor should resolve the issue.