[Flac] metaflac --no-utf8-convert complains about UTF

[Brian Willoughby]

Hello Jan,

I assume the problem is that metaflac has no way of knowing the encoding that was provided on the command line, since it could literally be anything. The --no-utf8-convert option means that metaflac does nothing to the letters as they pass through, and then the problem becomes that the next program to read the tags has to assume the character set without any information. If the program reading the tags gets the character set wrong, then you see garbage.

It's possible that the "local charset" or "locale" will be the same on the command line and in the application interpreting the characters, but that's not always true.

Or, to put it another way, isn't the assumption that all tags in a FLAC file are UTF-8? Thus, if you provide LATIN2 and don't allow metaflac to convert, then it's sure to be garbage.

By the way, I can see the Czech letters properly in your email, because it has a header saying Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-2" and my Mac uses that information to decode the characters correctly. Not that I can pronounce Czech properly, but it sure looks like some of my favorite movie titles…

I'm just guessing here, but I assume that the best way to handle this would be to provide the characters to metaflac in UTF-8 and not use that option (because it ignores the charset). Then the applications reading out the tags will know that they're UTF-8.

Obviously, if anyone has better procedures for this, please explain. I don't actually know whether this option is supposed to work on input, output, or both.

Brian


On Dec 5, 2014, at 11:16 AM, Jan Stary <hans at stare.cz> wrote:
> This is 1.3.1 on OpenBSD/amd64.
> The --no-utf8-convert option of metaflac(1) does not work for me:
> 
> $ metaflac --no-utf8-convert --set-tag="Artist=Žoužlíček" aladin.flac
> aladin.flac: ERROR: tag value for 'Artist' is not valid UTF-8
> (You probably can't see the Czech letters properly in my mail,
> but that's beside the point.)
> 
> Indeed, it is not valid UTF8 (it's LATIN2), but isn't metaflac
> supposed to just write it as specified, with this option?
>