Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Tag 'em and bag 'em.

I knew I couldn't go for long without a new post. Here's some friendly advice for all you folks with dual boot systems like mine. If you're allowing each OS read-write access to a shared FAT partition, be careful when changing the tags on music files.

I ran into some trouble with my song tags just now. As I've mentioned previously, I have Ubuntu automatically mount the FAT32 partition with the UTF-8 character set. Windows also has access to said partition. I edited song tags in Windows because characters like ΓΌ showed up as gibberish. So I just replaced them with the Alt+0252 key combination. As soon as I booted into Linux again, Rhythmbox refused to run. It would crash while loading the song library. When I deleted the folder containing the files whose tags I edited in Windows, Rhythmbox could suddenly load without incident. The cause of the crashes seems clear.

So unless you want to delete and recopy your songs, don't put special characters in your song tags in Windows; do it in Linux. You'll just have to ignore the weird symbols. Maybe it wouldn't be an issue if I didn't have the shared partition mounted with charset=utf-8, but I'm not about to mess with my /etc/fstab when everything is working so well.

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