GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 639947
Strange characters when selecting playlists to sync to MP3 player
Last modified: 2012-12-16 21:45:33 UTC
When trying to sync music to my Sansa Clip Plus MP3 player, the menu for choosing playlists available for syncing contains many ??? characters on either side of playlist names: ??? Sansa ??? ??? Playlist1 ??? ??? Playlist2 ??? Furthermore, once music has been synced to the device, there are more strange characters in the playlists listed below the MP3 player in the left-hand navigation bar. I have attached screenshots as it saves me explaining. Please let me know if I can provide any more information to help. Thanks
Created attachment 178723 [details] Second screenshot
Created attachment 178724 [details] First screenshot
Which version and distro are you using? Could you try to compile Banshee yourself? This looks like bug 608243 that was fixed a year ago.
Linux jonoxps 2.6.35-22-generic #35-Ubuntu SMP Sat Oct 16 20:36:48 UTC 2010 i686 GNU/Linux I'm using Ubuntu 10.04 with Banshee version 1.9.2 fresh from the PPA. This must be another bug?
can you test with a banshee version >=1.95 ?
Tested in Banshee 2.0 in Ubuntu 11.04 (Beta 2) The problem is still present, screenshot attached.
Created attachment 186003 [details] screen grab of the problem
I really don't think this is our problem. My guess is Debian or Ubuntu's packaging system/process is messing up our source code, not treating it as UTF-8. Please file on Launchpad.
It seems that this was already reported on Launchpad back in 2010 but nobody has yet dealt with the bug. I have added extra information and screenshots and hopefully somebody can look into this soon. https://bugs.launchpad.net/banshee/+bug/685119
Regarding this, the issue is that mono doesn't consider source code to be UTF-8 unless your locale is set to UTF-8. Meaning that those who don't use a UTF-8 locale while building Banshee will see this bug. I think this can be resolved by passing -codepage:utf8 into the build.
Oh really?! Sounds like a bug in Mono, and also something we can work around in Banshee by passing that argument.
Why isn't the locale set to utf-8 on the ubuntu builds, though?
It's set to C for the sake of a pristine environment, if I'm not mistaken.
I'm seeing this in Arch Linux, using Banshee 2.4.1 (all previous versions had this bug too). What I'd like to add is that I am not sure that this is an issue related to how banshee is built, because I'm 100% sure that I get these question marks only occasionally :) That is - one time I try to sync my player - and ??? are there, and next day those are pretty " symbols. The other day - again ???. So this seems to be dependent on something in runtime... Also I noticed that banshee keeps forgetting my selection for this combobox and always has 'Manage Manually' there. Could it be because of these changing quotes? Aka it remembers one string and then it doesn't match, so things are reset to defaults...
Created attachment 215641 [details] question marks and quotes mixed Oh, by the way, as an addition to my previous comment, check out this screenshot I just done. It has question marks and quotes mixed! :)
I can confirm what Dmitry says - there have been times when there were no question marks in the drop-down list. Furthermore, sometimes I have to re-select the playlist to be synced as Banshee forgets the previous value - perhaps suggesting a string mismatch.
Created attachment 231657 [details] [review] Proposed patch Screenshot posted in comment 1 makes me think this is related to bug 647917, which was fixed a year ago (about some months after this bug was reported). Dmitry on the other hand says he reproduces this with Banshee 2.4.1, which was released this year; however, he seems to refer to the problem that screenshot posted in comment 2 highlights, which seems to be a bit different (although very related as well, i.e.: one problem could be the cause of the other). The latter, in theory, was fixed in bug 608243 as Alex points out. However, I just found out that the change for fixing this bug missed one occurrence of the harmful string, therefore I'm posting a patch to fix the last occurrence. (This also explains why some commenters in this bug asserted that they were getting this behaviour only "sometimes".)
Comment on attachment 231657 [details] [review] Proposed patch http://git.gnome.org/browse/banshee/commit/?id=2c697a209790ae241d1f44cccf2bb10ea91135cc
This problem has been fixed in the development version. The fix will be available in the next software release. Thank you for your bug report.