Bug report: Music Player problems handling some Scandinavian/Germanic characters

First: I've had the Z2000 Pro for 2-3 months and am very happy with how it plays everything I throw at it. My use is quite "narrow" though, it's really only x265 (2160p, mainly with HDR10 or DV) and flac.

The SMB/NTFS bug was a huge issue though but with the 1.0.65 beta that is solved.

That said, to provide a good user experience there are still a few things to fix. I have e-mailed Zidoo a couple of weeks ago but reporting it here as well since I have received no acknowledgement from Zidoo and I don't know how they pick up and prioritize what to fix.

Anyway, this is the issue: the Music Player cannot handle certain European characters (å, ä, ö) (used in Germanic and Scandinavian languages) in Artist Names in the "play" view (where Artist Name is displayed with smaller font size under the Track Name, to the upper right). If there are such characters in the Artist Name, it is not displayed at all.

Also, in the same view, in the data under the sleeve picture (to the lower left), there is an issue displaying the Album Name if it has any of these characters. As an example, for the album "Uppståndelse!", the entire folder name (as stored on the internal HD) is displayed instead, in this case "Kai Martin & STICK! - Uppståndelse! (Silence 1985)", even though the Album attribute in the ID3 tag is: "Uppståndelse!".

The same characters in Track Names display as they should.

Hopefully these are easy fixes.

A different additional fix, probably requiring some more effort, would be to have the Music Player read the ID3 tag data "in real-time" and not force us to have to index the music library to get correct info displayed when playing the tracks. Or well, it's not correct as can be seen from this bug report, but it certainly is better than what was displayed before I let the machine scrape the music library and its ID3 tags.

I have no interest in using the music library (or a poster wall for movies), I actually prefer to play all media through the file browser (and that is the use case that my reporting is based on). But irrespective of that, it anyhow makes no sense to me why the player is not reading the ID3-tag of the actual file when it plays it.

 

Having played through more of the collection the same character handling issues are also there for another common Germanic character, ẞ (double s), and for the Cyrillic alphabet (don't know enough about that alphabet to be able to tell if it's a general issue or only related to certain characters though) .

Not great, none of my other media players through the years have had any issues handling characters from across the globe in this type of context. It seems that a broader set of test cases is needed in the Zidoo test bed for this view in the Music Player, and/or generally more solid character handling.

Hoping that these issues are fixed too so the user experience becomes good for this use case

Ending on a happier note, the player anyhow plays all flac files I've tried so far (and plays them well), which is more than can be said about the other media players referred to (they play most files, but not all, and also reboot sometimes while playing certain files). I mainly play files with 16/44, 24/96 and 24/44 bit depth/sample rates, bought through e.g. Bandcamp or created myself with dBpoweramp.

 

Totally agree! The same problem with lyrics, diacritical marks are often displayed incorrectly, the lyrics of many songs are simply not found, does not support embedded lyrics in mp3 or flacs

 

At least you were "lucky" that Agneta Fältskog wasn't spelled correctly so you avoided the problem with the "ä" character in Artist Names

 

As OTA kept insisting that "Your software is up to date" for my Z2000 Pro (running 1.0.65) I downloaded and installed the 1.0.75 package for the Z2000 Pro from the McBluna site.

Since the descriptions in the Change Logs of what is fixed/changed are often somewhat ambiguous I was hoping that #2 on the list (Optimized abnormal display of video names in the playback interface.) would include addressing these issues in the Music Player, but having just tested it these issues still remain, none of them are fixed

 

An additional issue to add to this area of issues with artist/album/track info not being displayed correctly when played: Track Names starting with digits are displayed without the digits.

A few examples:
"20th Century Promised Land" is displayed as "th Century Promised Land"
"39 By Design" is displayed as "By Design"
"20s" is displayed as "s"

I really hope this area is addressed in the next fw version.

These things should be much easier to fix than e.g. all of the video playing issues reported (of which I'm fortunately experiencing none myself so far).

These Music Player data display issues also sadly sours the experience of playing music somewhat, and soils the impression of the product as a whole (as I think I've mentioned before I can't get any of my friends to buy it even though I recommend it, since to them these issues signal poor quality overall, specifically since it's reported and not being dealt with).

 

Another fw release (1.o.86) with no attention given to any of these issues