help me deal with incorrect character encodings from freedb.org

Bug #399502 reported by Marius Gedminas
16
This bug affects 3 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Sound Juicer
New
Low
sound-juicer (Ubuntu)
Triaged
Low
Unassigned

Bug Description

Binary package hint: sound-juicer

As far as I understand, when Sound Juicer is unable to find track information on MusicBrainz, it falls back to freedb.org.

A lot of data on freedb.org is Unicode-impaired. All Lithuanian track titles I've seen are mistakenly interpreted as being in Windows-1252 instead of the proper Windows-1257, and all accented Lithuanian characters end up displayed wrong.

I've just inserted a CD with 47 tracks and am now unhappily slogging through manually fixing them all character by character. There ought to be a better way! A hidden gconf setting assume_freedb_encoding would suffice, if an option is deemed to be too obscure.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.04
Package: sound-juicer 2.26.1-0ubuntu1
ProcEnviron:
 LC_CTYPE=lt_LT.UTF-8
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=lt_LT.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: sound-juicer
Uname: Linux 2.6.28-13-generic i686

Revision history for this message
Marius Gedminas (mgedmin) wrote :
Changed in sound-juicer:
status: Unknown → New
Revision history for this message
Chen Levy (launchpad-net-chenlevy) wrote :

Although the FreeDB information suppose to be encoded with UTF-8, virtually all the information about Hebrew music CDs was encoded as cp1255 (Windows Hebrew Code-Page).

The result, naturally, is a unendurable mess of Gibberish. This makes the software almost useless for Hebrew music listeners.

IMHO, a good solution would be:

1. Use UTF-8 as a default.
2. Have a button or a link with a test such as "This looks wrong, let me try and fix this"
3. When said button is pressed, an encoding menu A-La Firefox's "View -> Encoding" sub menu should appear. Note that the Firefox menu is well organize (as well as a mess of encodings can be). It also has a dynamic list that remembers the used encodings, so if I used cp1255 once, it will be trivial to use it again. A way to organize the dynamic list the change the default encoding is a nice extra.
4. As a way to fix the current state, have an option to send the FreeDB/MusicBrainz back the listings but with fixed encoding.

Thanks for reading this.
| Cheers,
} Chen

Changed in sound-juicer (Ubuntu):
status: New → Confirmed
Changed in sound-juicer (Ubuntu):
importance: Undecided → Low
status: Confirmed → Triaged
Changed in sound-juicer:
importance: Unknown → Low
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