Japanese/Korean characters are suddenly not displayed anymor

[mugaso]

Hi everyone,

I've used MediaMonkey for several years now without any problems. Now, unfortunately, it won't display any foreign characters (Japanese/Chinese/Korean) anymore. Windows can still deal with them correctly, as well as every other program, so I assume it has to be an issue within MM.
Has someone encountered a similar problem or is there any Menu/config-File where I can check the font, MM is using and whether or not it supports those characters?

greetings mugaso

[zac]

Confirm this. I store Chinese characters in custom fields, and it's been fine all these years until the last few versions. (I'm currently using 4.05 and can never get it to appear)

[Harlequin]

Asian characters haven't shown for me for a few versions. The latest one today didn't fix either.

Screenshot below. Shows Russian showing up, but Chinese not showing up. They are just squares. Is there a setting or something I need to change?

[luisaoki]

Just installed Windows 8 64 bits and re installed Mediamonkey 4.0
Suddenly, I can't see japanese/chinese characters anymore

they are showing like the example of Harlequim, just squares.

I tried with the beta version 4.0.6.1501, still broken.

What can I do to help?

[PetrCBR]

It looks like known bug in windows. See http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/wind ... cadff4aafa
For me create of second user account work.

[scott967]

Don't have an answer to your problem, but I haven't had any problem with displaying east Asian glyphs (characters) in MM4 on Win 7 (through 4.06).

Was curious about font issues in Windows in general, so did some digging. Still don't really have a grip o it, but it seems like:

1. The fonts used in MM4 are controlled by the skin in use. The skin I am currently on (Vitreous) seems to use Tahoma for most text. Note: My language setting is en (default) in MediaMonkey.ini.

2. In Windows since Win98 there is a system to allow for font substitution when the selected font doesn't provide the necessary glyph. How this substitution gets done depends on a couple of factors, which determine how text is drawn and displayed on your system (most common is that a program uses GDI though I guess now MS is promoting DirectWrite as an alternative). There is something called "Uniscribe" which has to be turned on in Win XP (along with many non-latin fonts) but is on automatically in I guess Vista and up. Uniscribe is designed to work with "complex fonts" (for example, right-to-left ordering, etc) but I guess may help with "normal" font rendering (I believe the fonts used must be of the "open-type" variety). Uniscribe has the concept of "fallback fonts" which are used when the required character\glyph isn't in the selected font. I couldn't find a description of the actual fallbacks.

An alternative method is to use GDI font linking to accomplish the same thing (finding an appropriate font for a character/glyph that isn't in the selected font). Font linking is set up in the registry under a key
HKLM/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Windows NT/CurrentVersion/FontLink/SystemLink

For example for Tahoma it shows:
MSGOTHIC.TTC,MS UI Gothic
MINGLIU.TTC,PMingLiU
SIMSUN.TTC,SimSun
GULIM.TTC,Gulim

which should allow display for most Unicode glyphs.

3. MediaMonkey AFAICT is using Unicode / UTF-16 to represent all text data (character/strings) as does windows. So there shouldn't be any issue with the internal storage, library database, etc. Just a display issue.

So, based on what I can find out I would suggest first trying a different skin and seeing if that works. If that doesn't work my guess would be some sort of problem with the font linking. But if that was the case I would think you would see a problem in other programs in addition to MM.

scott s.
.

[Guest]

I have had a similar issue, except I have songs that display properly and ones that don't
The song playing has absolutely wtf characters in the title, but it renders the filenames just fine. Then there are files that it displays correctly for alltogether.

[scott967]

I had on occasion problem like this. Retagging/renaming solved it. My guess is if you looked at the file in a hex editor you might figure out went wrong. When doing some work like this I found a freeware program online, BabelPad, which is good for exploring non English (latin) text and also has some good online documentation to get you up to speed on text. Note that "modern" Windows (at least XP and up) uses 16 bit unicode encoding for all its internal stuff and also the NTFS file system, but will also convert text to 8-bit code page if it detects a program that can't handle unicode (MM4 does use unicode so that shouldn't be an issue). From what I've seen, Windows will substitute a "?" for any unicode character that isn't defined in the 8 bit code page when it does a conversion for a non-unicode program. This includes text copy - pasted via the clipboard.

Keep in mind many programs are able to use text with unicode encoded in the UTF-8 format, and you need to ensure that any text from those programs is encoded in 16 bit unicode if you want the OS (and I think, MM4) to use it properly.

scott s.
.