0

I'm syncing .mp3 files with UTF-8 filenames and .m3u playlists referencing these filenames -- generated on an Ubuntu system -- to a Windows machine. .mp3 filenames appear correctly in the Windows explorer, but when trying to play a .m3u playlist with Windows Media Player, it shows broken filenames and skips over files with non-ASCII characters.

I guess the filenames are stored in another encoding than UTF-8 on Windows, which Ubuntu One doesn't really care about, but the contents of the .m3u files aren't translated.

I'm looking for suggestions in dealing with this! :-)

Thanks!

-- Loïc Minier

1
  • Creating a .wpl file with the playlist worked; I copy-pasted the model from: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Media_Player_Playlist and it worked with UTF-8 encoded filenames (since encoding of XML is well defined). Another option is to use more tolerant software such as VLC.
    – lool
    Sep 30, 2011 at 14:29

1 Answer 1

1

The problem is that your music player on windows is opening the .m3u in something other than UTF-8. From searching around a little, it seems that if the extension is .m3u8, things will just work.

What's more, the Wikipedia article on M3U says that the encoding has to be Latin-1 if the extension is .m3u, and that you have to use .m3u8 for UTF-8 encoded filenames.

Also, as you lool pointed out "[c]reating a .wpl file with the playlist worked; I copy-pasted the model from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Media_Player_Playlist and it worked with UTF-8 encoded filenames (since encoding of XML is well defined). Another option is to use more tolerant software such as VLC."

2
  • Unfortunately, WMP doesn't recognize .m3u8 nor .pls files; drag-n-drop such a file to WMP and it wont add them to the queue, and by default these aren't associated to WMP either.
    – lool
    Sep 30, 2011 at 14:18
  • Interestingly, VLC takes the .m3u with UTF-8 filenames just fine under Windows.
    – lool
    Sep 30, 2011 at 14:21

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .