[bug] [ios] m3u playlist containing songs with special characters cant be found

2025-04-05 10:53:19

I got my m3u files in the playlists folder in the Foobar2000 Documents folder.
I could open a find my playlists and found that most songs are found and can be played.
The songs that have special characters like Chinese, é ö, ï, ä, ð, ō (accents and a lot more other characters) cannot be found.
These special characters are in the song title, artist name and album name (because my files are sorted in folders like artist\album\songtitle.mp3)
See screenshot for an example with Arvo Pärt.
In the music library everything is correctly displayed

I use an iPhone 12 that is up to date with foobar 1.6.7 64 bit

Re: [bug] [ios] m3u playlist containing songs with special characters cant be found

Reply #1 – 2025-04-05 20:50:42

The m3u playlist format isn't suitable for non-ascii characters. By specs it simply uses system ANSI codepage, it can't handle Chinese characters at all, but it may be able to store some of the example letters depending on your locale. Though whether those work at all on another system is a different matter, but it can work on the same machine where the playlist was made.

The m3u8 format however uses UTF-8 encoding and supports all the languages in the world. This is what you should be using when dealing with international characters.

Re: [bug] [ios] m3u playlist containing songs with special characters cant be found

Reply #2 – 2025-04-06 07:53:40

Thank you for explaining, that solved it.
How can I edit the title of this topic?