[odedee]

Hi,

This is my first post, if this is the wrong place please direct me where to post this, thanks.

I have many folders with music by Hebrew artists. Both folder names and names of the files (songs) inside them are in Hebrew. When I browse these folders from windows I can see the Hebrew folder names and file names properly. But in Kodi, things are different...

I have kodi on raspberry Pi, on windows and on android.

In android and in RPi Kodi, Hebrew folder names are displayed properly, but names of the files inside are garbled Latin characters.
In windows Kodi, Hebrew folder names show as squares, and names of the files inside are garbled Latin characters, as above.

The songs will play on all platforms, but of course being unable to navigate to the song I'm looking for is troublesome. The Latin characters are displayed both when browsing music, and on the "now playing" screen. There is no general problem with Hebrew - the GUI is in Hebrew in all three cases.

Any idea if it is possible to have legible Hebrew file names and how to go about it?

I use Kripton 17.3, with the default estuary skin. Not a kodi expert so not sure what other info is important.
Thanks!

[Hitcher]

Try switching the fonts used to Arial.

Settings > Interface settings > Skin - fonts.

[odedee]

Thanks, but the font is already Arial, otherwise I would not have seen the Hebrew GUI or the Hebrew folder names. For some obscure reason, the file names are still not displayed properly.

[scott967]

Are you sure you are looking at the file names, or actually Kodi is reading the song file tags and displaying the track (song) titles from the tags? If so, and the tags were written in an 8-bit encoding eg Windows-1255 or ISO 8859-8 then they might not be interpreted properly in Kodi. They should be in UTF-16 (if mp3 typical tag format ID3v2.3) or UTF-8 (most other tag formats).

scott s.
.

[jjd-uk]

In case Scott is right and the tag reading is causing the issue try with "Enable tag reading" turned off in Settings -> Media -> Music, assuming it's at the default of on.

[odedee]

You got it! Thank you both!!

I turned off the ID3 tag readings, and I can now see the song names properly.

It's been several years since I ripped my CDs so not 100% sure but I believe I used WMP for ripping into MP3. Is there something I need to configure differently in WMP (or elsewhere) to have tags written in 16-bits? Far from an expert, I assume tags can be useful in certain cases

Edit: I did some tags touch-ups a couple years back, using musicbrainz - could that be the culprit?

[DaveBlake]

Glad you got an answer.

Far from an expert, I assume tags can be useful in certain cases

Edit: I did some tags touch-ups a couple years back, using musicbrainz - could that be the culprit?

It sounds like you are only using file mode rather than creating a music library. Kodi music library offers various ways to navigate your music colection and see additional infomation and artwork connected to the music. It is based on the tag data embedded in your music files.

I suggest that you revisit your tagging using Picard or Mp3tag, getting names into UTF-16, and then add music source(s) to create a library to see what it can do.

[odedee]

Correct, I currently only use file mode...

For some reason, in Picard while ID3v2 version 2.3 defaults to UTF-16, version 2.4 defaults to UTF-8 - but I can change that to 16.
Should I use version 2.3 or 2.4?

[scott967]

Correct, I currently only use file mode...

For some reason, in Picard while ID3v2 version 2.3 defaults to UTF-16, version 2.4 defaults to UTF-8 - but I can change that to 16.
Should I use version 2.3 or 2.4?

That is correct. IMHO 2.4 is the better spec and UTF-8 is a better encoding . The main problem is if you use other music player software, it may not be able to use the 2.4 tags. 2.3 is kind of a lowest common denominator.

scott s.
.