Cyrillic encoding problems with Russian CDs -- freedb?

[idiotprogrammer]

Hi, there, I have ripped a lot of CDs with the latest version of Audiograbber.

I often have a lot of problems with the song list that freedb gives Audiograbber. Often I will insert a Russian CD, and freedb will find the song, but the encoding is garbled.

When I used a Cyrillic language checker, I see that the source encoding is Windows-1251 and and it is viewed correctly using encoding iso-8859-1

For example, here is sample text: ñïëèí ìàðèÿ è õóàíà .

This sort of encoding problems seems to be common with Russian albums on freedb.

When you go here http://2cyr.com/decode/?lang=en and input this and choose the source and output encoding as mentioned above, you get

сплин мария и хуана

Is there any way I can configure audiograbber or freedb so that it fixes these encoding problems? Also, is there any way that I can capture the data query result from freedb so that I can obtain the output as a text file? Thanks

[[[global:guest]]]

More.

I noticed that you can install language packs on the Audiograbber download page.

Basically, after you query freedb and before you rip, you should choose the language you want (from the File menu on the program).

Heres the problem though. In the program itself you see the target language (like Russian). But the id3 metadata in Windows Explorer and VLC shows gobblygook. Im guessing that audiograbber does not natively support unicode, but the language support only works when your system is using a country specific encoding. Its frustrating because this program is mature and works well. But internationalization is a growing concern.

[onon15]

Freedb suffers from a lot of uploads in ASCII encoding rather than UTF-8. So even though it supports UTF-8 well, many contributors use software that doesnt, and unknowingly put badly encoded discs in it.

I was suffering this on Hebrew tracks, so I created a web application for fixing it. It can easily be used for any other language; once there is enough fixes my app automatically updates freedb.

See it at http://freedb-enc-fix.appspot.com/

[[[global:guest]]]

Comments from the original thread

idiotprogrammer on 2012-07-29:
Im guessing that the app itself is not unicode and therefore what it displays depends on the users local settings. (By the way, I notice the same problems with VLC on two machines). I can edit the files using an mp3 editor, but it would help if I could find the album in freedb..