audacious cannot display ID3 tags in Russian

[Stilor]

Binary package hint: audacious

avn@etoile:~$ lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu karmic (development branch)
Release: 9.10
avn@etoile:~$ apt-cache policy audacious
audacious:
  Installed: 2.1-1ubuntu1
  Candidate: 2.1-1ubuntu1
  Version table:
 *** 2.1-1ubuntu1 0
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com karmic/universe Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

Audacious can no longer display the ID3 tags encoded in Russian (where CP1251) is de-facto standard.
Tried following combinations in Preferences->Playlist:
* Automatic encoding detector for: None; Fallback encoding: cp1251
* Automatic encoding detector for: Russian; Fallback encoding: None
* Automatic encoding detector for: Russian; Fallback encoding: cp1251

In every case, the playlist displays question marks followed by "(invalid UTF-8)". Files have

Tried on both v2.3 and v2.4 files with fields encoded in cp1251. If I convert tags to UTF-8, audacious can display tags correctly. However, this would break compatibility with "other OS". Previous version of Audacious (in Kubuntu 8.04) used to work okay with such files.

[Mihail Samoylov (mihail-samoylov)]

http://jira.atheme.org/browse/AUD-36
explanation & patch

[Dmitry Tantsur (divius)]

Yeah, is's pain(
as far as I can gather the patch is already upstream (probably ongoing aud 2.2?)

[.kkursor (kkursor-3es)]

Affects me too.
Waiting for solution.

[Dmitry Tantsur (divius)]

Solution is upgrading to 2.2

[Dmitry Tantsur (divius)]

Still no progress. Is it that difficult to package new version (bug 494604 )?

[Daniel Eckl (daniel-eckl)]

I guess there are audacious 2.2 builds in some PPA repositories, in this case you might just use that instead.

But there is no way to just package it for official update repositories, because the policy is to keep the versions stable throughout an Ubuntu release and just backport the bugfixes. So somebody would need to find the one difference between audacious 2.1 and 2.2 that makes this bug go away and port it back to version 2.1 if possible.

Why is it so dangerous to just push a new version to official repositories? The package audacious is a very good example why this would be dangerous. For myself I use audacious 2.1 with the icecast plugin. Until now I was not able to successfully use the icecast plugin of audacious 2.2, it seems to be severely broken. Pushing audacious 2.2 into official repositories would mean breaking functions for everybody that have worked before. This is something the Ubuntu team has to avoid in any circumstances. Nobody can tell what other functions would break with pushing version 2.2.

I hope I could help to explain the problem.

[Dmitry Tantsur (divius)]

Then why not add a simple patch and release 2.1-1ubuntu2?
http://jira.atheme.org/secure/attachment/10062/chardet.c.patch

[Daniel Eckl (daniel-eckl)]

If that's all what's needed (I can't judge, no packager or developer), then you would be right, it would be a justifiable amount of work.

[Dmitry Tantsur (divius)]

At least upstream considers this a fix and in 2.2 autodetection works.

[Daniel Eckl (daniel-eckl)]

I recompiled the audacious 2.1 package from official repositories using this patch and for me it fixes my problem with german umlauts and french special chars in song names. As a layperson it seems to me that this patch cannot cause any major harm or security threat, but I'm not the one to be sure about that.

[Jean-Louis Dupond (dupondje)]

This is fixed in the new version that gets into Lucid :)