getting metadata to show non-english characters

having trouble with a client’s project where his non-english titles aren’t showing up properly in the metadata. they are find in the CD-TEXT and the file names, but if you GET INFO on a file on the desktop to view the metadata the non-english characters have been replaced…

for example:

Empêcher

turned into:

Empêcher


is there a setting somewhere in the metadata tabs that can correct this? i have been poking around but found nothing yet… so i figure i’d post here while i keep looking…

thank you!

All metadata text is encoded as unicode. I guess your reader application is not capable of reading unicode.

thanks… i guess i will pass this info onto the client…

for me, it’s the Mac OS not showing the character properly (via the GET INFO command) and for the client… i’m not sure… he is in France, but it’s not showing up for him correctly either.

If you mean Wavelab WAV files in Mac Finder and Windows Explorer it was like that in Wavelab 9, but was going to be changed.

There are various metadata. I mentioned ID3v2, but maybe you spoke about another type of metadata?

Hi PG and Taylor. If it’s wav files, finder and explorer read the riff not the ID3v2. And the problem seems the same as 2018 although I haven’t tried it in wavelab 10 yet.

The riff metadata has no standard for text encoding, that’s a very old file format, before unicode became the norm. In the absence of a standard, WaveLab chooses to use UTF-8 which is the norm today.
I guess your metadata reader uses the local character text as default.

When not using english, I recommend not using RIFF metadata fields, but ID3v2 fields.

But the “metadata reader” is built into the OS, the “get info” of Mac finder, and “properties” of Windows 10 (and music folder metadata columns of both). And they both still read RIFF list info metadata for artist and title etc. when reading wav files, and will probably continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Not id3 in wav. Also I’ve tried Wavelab 10 for this and it’s still the same, same as it was in Wavelab 9 in 2018.

It’s not a huge deal to me, and the person who complained about it on the German forum apparently didn’t pursue it further, but it’s not right, and other programs deal with it in a way that Mac OS and Windows OS can display correctly.

And it also works both ways - files from other programs where accents appear ok in Mac and Win OS appear with garbage characters in the riff metadata when opened in Wavelab 10.

Note that strictly CD-Text is only defined for ASCII and Japanese (not in Unicode form). The European diacritics included in ANSI usually work, but even these are outside the strict specification.

Paul

PG you said in the other thread

“WaveLab stores the RIFF tags in unicode UTF-8, which allows universal text reading.
But the header does not specify this. I will need to add this information.”

Can you still do that? That would most likely fix this wouldn’t it?

Taylors problem really appears to be exactly the same problem, and is dependent on the riff: riff list info metadata with accents in Wavelab wav files appears as garbage in the OS, the Mac “get info” and the Windows “properties”.

In fact, I found no standard way to explicitly specify that UTF8 is used as encoding.

If including a BOM is not sufficiently compatible (and I suspect there is still software that doesn’t recognise and handle it), could we be given the option whether or not to include it in certain situations?

Paul

Thanks for checking it PG. I finally found the original german thread that I apparently had contributed to (short memory).

Chrome and new Edge and probably other browsers will offer to translate it:

(sorry can’t make a webpage translate link at google translate anymore).

Anyway, I had tried making test files with Goldwave and dbpoweramp (and Foobar and Audacity, which didn’t work as well - they just translated the characters to ascii (?), but at least you didn’t get garbage in the OS) and Goldwave and dbpoweramp did very well. If I open the files in a hex editor (which is the only way I know how to look at this) Goldwave and dbpoweramp are doing it in a way they have in common, which is different from Wavelab. If that’s worth checking to see the difference.

Also, doesn’t Cubase do riff list info in wav, and if so, I wonder how it does with this? I dont have Cubase to try, but I did try Reaper which apparently added riff INFO for wav recently and in fairness to Wavelab, it does just as badly as Wavelab. Garbage characters in the OS.

But if Wavelab could be made to do accents in the OS as well as Goldwave or dbpoweramp, it would be a benefit to Wavelab.

Thanks, I will check what Goldwave does (written to my todo list, don’t expect an answer in the near future).

FYI, for 10.0.50, I have found a way to solve the problem.