I’m a French user of the Sansa Fuze, and I’m quite happy with it. However, I’ve noticed that the Fuze uses ISO-8859-1 encoding, and not UTF-8. This may not matter for English speaking people, but can be of importance for others!
ISO-8859-1 does not recognize every character used in French. For instance, “œ” is missing. It’s not the most frequent character, but it’s used in “cœur”, which means “heart”. On the fuze, I get “c“ur” instead.
Is it possible for the UTF-8 encoding to appear in next firmware?
I have about 20 albums from (Jamendo.com) European independent artists in the classical style. Some of the album’s titles and track names are not in English. I’d enjoy seeing the original language format to keep them as original as possible.
Just wondering, because I’m considering buying Sansa Fuze;
does the Sansa Fuze support diacretic characters at all? I.e., is this flaw only in the file names, or also in mp3 tag info?
AFAIK, FAT (even with LFN support) was developed in the times, that there was no (common) networks, and it was assumed that there would not be files exchanged between computers with different file name encodings…
Hence, a FAT32 (or 16) file system does not have any way of specifying what encoding the file names use. So, technically, it is not a bug that the player does not show the diacretic characters in file names, since it is a matter of contract or the OS what encoding is used in the file names anyways. Since there is no sane way of specifying the encoding, there is no way for a player to display diacretic characters correctly - except, if it would have a setting in the menus to specify the encoding that is used. The other solution is to always use a certain, common encoding. If this is the case, then it makes sense to choose an encoding that can support at least most languages using Latin alphabet, but maybe not UTF-8 since it is not so wide spread yet; at least not in the FAT world.
Of course, these might not apply if you use MTP… I wouldn’t know since I dread everything that is anything like MTP and don’t have any experience with it.
Tags are a different matter. At least OGG tags contain the encoding they use in a certain tag field. This means that technically any player could see what encoding was used and interpret the data correctly to display correct characters, if they are available in the used font. So, if it is a issue of the player just not understanding UTF-8 (but the player actually contains the diacretic characters in it’s fonts), it most probably supports ISO8859-15(or -16, or whatever) - and this can be worked around by choosing a/the encoding used by the player.
It is especially lame if the player doesn’t have diacretic characters in it’s font(s) AT ALL.
Message Edited by PinkyBrainded on 08-29-2008 08:41 PM
ISO-8859-1 doesn’t have œ, but ISO8859-15 (and -16) does have. Devs and others: see here - the table further in the article is very informative.
So, it seems that the Fuze is most probably missing that character alltogether. You can only hope someone from Sandisk is reading this, since adding it (along with iso-8859-15 / -16) should be trivial. UTF-8 support would not be that trivial, but nice =)
Actually, the Fuze already supports UTF-8 encoding for playlists using the .m3u8 file extension.
To support all the various ISO-8859-X flavors, SanDisk would have to add another system setting to indicate which -X flavor to use.
I would prefer they just support Unicode (with optional UTF-8 encoding) and then they could handle any language (for which a character bitmap is provided in the ROM, of course).
P.S.: I would also like to see them handle a leading Byte Order Mark in the UTF-8 encoded playlist, which they currently don’t.
Actually, the Fuze already supports UTF-8 encoding for playlists using the .m3u8 file extension.
[snip]
I would prefer they just support Unicode (with optional UTF-8 encoding) and then they could handle any language (for which a character bitmap is provided in the ROM, of course).
It is worth noting that both Ogg Vorbis tags and FLAC tags are required to be stored in UTF-8 format; since the Fuze now supports both Ogg and FLAC, it must now support UTF-8 in some fashion, and the glyphs must be present.
Adding support for UTF-8 in ID3 tags is a far lower hurdle to clear than adding UTF-8 text display support to a device which previously lacked it.
I’ve been using UTF-8 (id3v2.3) without problems for a while, but only for a little since I lost my Fuze a week ago =(. I guess I must get a new one =P
As a french user too, I can tell you for sure that ID3v 2.3 tags coded in UTF -16 work fine with the Fuze. UTF-8 is officially supported since ID3v2.4 so the Fuze can’t really be blamed for not correctly displaying UTF-8 coded text in ID3v2.3 tags.
UTF-16 should be used with v2.3 tags, and UTF-8 with v2.4 tags.
Full support for ID3v2.4 should be implemented in the next firmware update.
I have the same problem with UTF tags in FLAC files. It’s quite uncomfortable to see artists, albums and song names incorrectly shown in Fuze (specially when searching for a song…). Bump, please!
As a french user too, I can tell you for sure that ID3v 2.3 tags coded in UTF -16 work fine with the Fuze. UTF-8 is officially supported since ID3v2.4 so the Fuze can’t really be blamed for not correctly displaying UTF-8 coded text in ID3v2.3 tags.
UTF-16 should be used with v2.3 tags, and UTF-8 with v2.4 tags.
Full support for ID3v2.4 should be implemented in the next firmware update.
That would be great… I’ll need a good software for that, though. Easytag doesn’t write the tags for every songs in an album. It even wipes everything from some songs!!