Special characters in track names a problem?

[Dick Ellis]

Everyone, I apologize if this question has been answered on the Forum. I'm a little behind in reading all the Forum postings.

I am ripping classical CDs. For those CDs not in the DB, I'm renaming in the Web UI based on track names displayed with the CD mounted in an external CD player connected to my iMac.  For convenience, I've been cutting and pasting track information from the external CD display into the Web UI.  For example,

16 Pulcinella 1. Overture - allegro moderato [Domenico Gallo - Trio sonata n.1 in sol maggiore movt.1]

17 Pulcinella 2.(ver. 1947) 2. Serenata : "Mentre l'erbetta pasce l'agnella" (T) [Pergolesi / "I Flaminio" #1# La Pastorale di Polidoro]

I've read warnings about using special characters, but I don't understand the exact rule about what characters may or may not be included in an album or track name.  Is there a list of the special characters to avoid and the circumstances where they would be a problem?

In the track names above, there are or might be special characters from the Linux point of view. Will this cause problems, and in what circumstances?

Are special characters a problem only if the track name exceeds 170 characters?

This also applies to ripping classical CDs that are in the DB where the track names have special characters like the above.

Thanks very much,

Dick

[Daniel Taylor]

I admit that I don't know the definitive answer to your question about special characters.  I do know that these  : / \ * ? " < >  are reserved characters in most operating systems.  Most computers will not let you use those characters if you try to type them into a folder or filename.  For other characters, such as those that would be encountered in letters of foreign names, such as Dvorak (which I've spelled here incorrectly because I don't have the right characters on my keyboard), it's unclear to me whether and why they might be a problem for the B2.  To play it safe, I just avoid them.  

On the B2, Artist names and Album names are used for the folder names that contain them.  Track names are used for the filenames of those tracks.  Tagging metadata, which the B2 does not use, allow for special characters.  But that's a whole other subject.

The 170 character limit has nothing to do with special characters.  It is a limit on the number of any characters.

[Hbunnet]

I have "Dvořák" in a track name without problems. 

[PMB]

Hi Dick,

Peter Lowham posted this a while ago - 

I would highly recommend that the following characters are not used in 'artist names', 'album names' or 'track names'.

Those nine characters are \ / : * ? " < > | .  There are also some issues with the 'reverse quote' character (`).  These are 'reserved characters' in Windows, Linux and MacOS, used for wildcard filename searches, folder name separators and other basic computer filename processing functions.  The use of some of these characters might be OK in one or two of the above operating systems but using any of them will cause problems somewhere along the line. 

For example, the B2 might accept some of these characters but when you view the folder through NAS, then Windows or MacOS might have problems in displaying those folders.

So the Brennan is not the limiting factor here, rather it is a combination of limitations across Windows, MacOS, Linux, Unix, etc.

To be on the safe side, I would encourage everyone to steer clear of these 'reserved characters'.  This applies most importantly if you are looking at your 'Export' backups through Windows or MacOS.

As Daniel has stated, reserved characters in folder or filenames should be avoided as they will cause problems somewhere in your systems or network.

For example, in the case above, the dot/ full stop (.) character, when used as the leading character in folder of file names in the Mac OSX system, causes the folder or file to not be displayed.

Those reserve characters are mainly :

\ backslash

/ forward slash

:  colon

;  semicolon

*  asterisk

?  question mark

<  less than

>  greater than

|  pipe

`  Reverse apostrophe or grave accent

.  full stop (as a leading character)

Paul

Brennan Support.

[Brennan Support]

Hello Richard

Martin Brennan here - I don't have any simple rules to follow about special characters - apart from if you have something that is causing problems let us know with as much detail as possible and we will try and rectify.

This article https://www.mtu.edu/umc/services/websites/writing/characters-avoid/ suggests characters that should be avoided - so if you have a problem and you see characters in that list - that would be a good place to start.

Names are encoded using someting called utf8 so each letter could take between one and four bytes internally so the 170 character limit you mentioned is not as simple as that but names under 170 letters are unlikely to be a problem.

There is an additional issue that utf8 can represent over 1 million letters - think Chinese, Thai, Greek, Arabic - but the B2 only has fonts for a subset of these.  So the OLED may show a placeholder character where it cannot find a match. Web browsers typically have more fonts so some album names could look fine on the web browser but not on the OLED. Or might be OK on your computer but incomplete on your mobile phone.

Hope that helps

Martin

[Daniel Taylor]

It is true that the colon (:) is a reserved character and should not be used.  However, I've been using the semicolon (;) in place of the colon, and have had no problem.  I think the semicolon is okay.

[Mark Fishman]

For myself, I find that restricting filenames (and tags) to the printable and pronounceable characters in USA-centric ASCII can avoid all problems, at the cost (of course) of eliminating accented characters and other things found in languages other than English. It's a sad truth that computers, like air-traffic control, are still dominated by English speakers, and unless you are savvy enough to know when and how to avoid possible problems, you're safer with pronounceable ASCII.

[Dick Ellis]

Hello Martin,

Thanks very much for clarifying for me the way characters are used by the B2. I understand the situation much better now and will follow the best practices you, Paul, Daniel and Mark described. Thanks all for your help. Also a special thanks to Paul, Joe and Amanda at Brennan and others on the Forum who helped me debug problems and arrange the replacement of my original B2. An additional benefit of owning a B2 is the opportunity to meet the really exceptional individuals at Brennan and on the Forum. It's a community for which I'm very happy to be a member.

Best,

Dick

[James O]

I did not research this in great detail, but did read what was posted above.

One problem I have noticed is with periods apostrophes ( ' )  and dashes ( - ) often show up correctly in the web interface but sometimes show up as periods ( . ) on the B2 display. Mainly notices this with in song titles, it may also be a problem with Artists as well, I just have looked closely as my B2 is mounted across the room in my Home Theater stack shelves.

While playing around, it seems I can easily go into the web interface and just delete the apostrophe  ( ' ) or dash ( - ) and then reenter while in the web interface, save and the problem is immediately corrected. I do not believe the problems is with reverse quotes ( ` ) from the song database but it could be?? I have tried to search using the reverse quote feature, but maybe this is not a valid search on the B2 web interface?

What is interesting is this does not appear to be a random or global problem. After searching and editing a number of song titles, I found that the problems almost always appear to be album specific or all song titles on an album with apostrophes ( ' )  and dashes ( - ) will show the same behavior as showing up as periods ( . ) on the B2 display.  So luckily once I find a problem album, I can just skip though the songs on the web interface looking for apostrophes ( ' )  and dashes ( - ) and then make the corrections on the fly. It will just take some time to find all the problems as I have around 430 albums and 4300 songs (and many more to load) to look over at this point!

So it is almost some strange problem when importing the data from the song database on the web or maybe the B2 web database gets slightly corrupt when obtaining Album and Song information??

I also believe I have seen this problem with a full quote ( " ) as well? 

Not an earth shattering problem, just would be nice to get this sorted out of possible at some point. 

Thanks in advance for any ideas or fixes.

James

[JFBUK]

Hi James,

if you are able to download your B2DB file and you could take a look at it on a computer then you can see what names the B2 has stored in its database for albums and tracks.

You can then compare with what you see displayed.

Don't directly edit the B2DB tin place on the B2 though.

Its a  key component to the B2 functionality

>SETTINGS>MAINTENANCE> b2db to USB C

or copy it over NAS

John

[Mark Fishman]

Your keyboard contains a key that produces a single typewriter-style quote or apostrophe (') and when shifted produces a double typewriter-style quote (").

What often happens is that the database entries for a CD or track name contains typographic or so-called smart quotes, which have a little curve to them and come in pairs or sets. Word-processing programs often insert these to replace the straight typewriter-style quotation marks that you can easily type. For example, this is a typographic apostrophe: ʼ -- at that size it's not obviously different from the keyboard apostrophe ' but has a completely different computer code (Unicode 02BC instead of Unicode 0027).

If you see quotation marks or apostrophes (or real dashes instead of hyphens) in names, replace them all with the stuff you can type.