Rhythmbox fails to recognize all unicode characters

[Sergio B]

Binary package hint: rhythmbox

Bugs similar to this one have been reported a few times but this is not the same as the other bugs. I have some songs in my music library that have Japanese characters which are stored in the Id3 tag as unicode characters and Rhythmbox fails to recognize and properly display them. Instead of the Japanese character Rhythmbox display a square with some small numbers inside (which i presume are the characters code) I have tried to re tag the mp3 files a couple of times but Rhythmbox still display them wrong. Here's what I have done.

1. I though that it may be a encoding error caused by Winamp so I went back to Windows and re-tagged the songs with the Windows Explorer. It didn't solve the problem.
2. I though it wold be solved if I re-tagged the songs from within Rhythmbox so I re-tagged all songs and they displayed OK in that session. I closed Rhythmbox and opened it again and the wrong displayed characters were back in place.
3. I used cowbell to re-tag the songs (although in cowbell the characters were properly displayed) and Rhythmbox still displays them wrong.
4. I removed the files from the music library and imported them again. Still the characters were not show properly.

I attached a Screenshot of this behavior, from left to right; 1) Rhytmbox on each start. 2) Rhytmbox after re-tagging the songs with it, 3) Cowbell with the same album loaded.

This might also be related to another bug I noticed when I re-tagged some other songs. I re-tagged some songs using Rhythmbox and replaced some romaji for the corresponding Japanese characters and it displayed well for that session when i restarted Rhytmbox it displayed the songs with romaji again but if I open the songs with cowbell it shows me the Japanese characters I put in tags with Rhytmbox this looks to me that Rhythmbox doesn't refresh the songs tags when it starts but instead it just keep the tags it had in it's database which is undesirable.

I hope this get fixed soon.

Ubuntu 10.10
Rhythmbox 0.13.1-0ubuntu6

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thanks for the report, it has been some time without any response or feedback in this bug report and we are wondering if this is still an issue for you with the latest release of Ubuntu the Natty Narwhal, May you please test with that version and comment back if you're still having or not the issue? Please have a look at http://www.ubuntu.com/download to know how to install that version. Thanks in advance and sorry for the late response.

[Sergio B (sergio-bobillier)]

Sorry this bug is outdated and it wasn't reported correctly.

What happens is this:

The files I mentioned in this bug had two ID3 tag frames (I didn't know that Mp3 files could have more than one ID3 tag frame) and what happened with Rhythmbox is that it was reading the first (or last I don't know for sure) frame it found while other players like Amarok, Winamp and the music tagger Cowbell were doing the opposite thing.

I used Winamp to remove one of the ID3 Tag Frames and the frame with the incorrectly encoded characters emerged, then i re-tagged the files and the incident never happened again (Because now the files only have on ID3 tag frame).

So this wasn't a bug after all it is just that Rhythmbox doesn't behave like other players do when reading the ID3 Tag information. Banshee was also showing this behavior and i thought that Banshee and Rhythmbox might be sharing the same ID3 tag library or something.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for rhythmbox (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]