Hello, I just installed Version 1.4.1 and I am very impressed!
I noticed one small problem: I have one song which had a "?" in the filename and in the Title tag. The lyrics were correctly fetched, and everytime I played the song amarok told me that it used the saved lyrics, and didn't fetch them. That works fine. But editing the lyrics via editing metadata (German version: "Metadaten bearbeiten...") from the context menu only brings up an empty dialog box with no text displayed.
Removing the "?" from filename and Title tag helped, but this behaviour seems to be reproducable...

Hi,
using chars like *,?,/ ,. in filenames is generally a bad idea. Try to avoid them; shouldn't be a problem in tags (with the exeption of Windoze Media Player ). These chars have special meanings in *nix filesystems. A filename like bla?.mp3 could be interpreted as all songs, called bla plus one additional character. In this case, you aren't able to edit the lyrics. Try selecting multiple songs from your playlist and you'll see, that some of the tags can't be edited.

Greetings

m0nk

I fully agree with you that it is generally a bad idea to use those chars in filenames, but some of these characters are allowed in some filesystems. So I think it would be a good idea if Amarok handled those characters right.

Greets
Clou

Hi,
as you wrote: some chars are allowed on some filesystems. Let's take AC/DC or AC\DC for example. In Unix it will be interpreted as folder DC inside of AC, Windows uses the backslash as seperator instead. So I configured my ripper (grip) and my tagger (easytag btw.) not to use ambigious chars in the filename. I can use them in the tags, nevertheless. So I don't have any trouble with different systems. And amarok uses of course the underlying filesystem, so it's a problem for the filesystem, not amarok. Btw. Windows Mediaplayer shows up AC;DC, seems that it's trying to avoid those trouble (in the windows way by raising new problems). But that's another story.

Greetings

m0nk

There is no such thing as "the" filesystem in UNIX, and you chose to pick the one character that is not allowed in the probably most common filesystems (ext2, ext3) in linux. But "?" is allowed in Filenames in ext2, ext3, ntfs, reiserfs, jfs, whereas it is not allowed in fat16 or fat32. 
And the point I tried to make was to say that Amarok is dragged into an unusual behaviour by oviously misinterpreting a completely legal filename whe trying to edit the saved lyrics. So I still think this is an Amarok bug...

Why should Amarok check what file system you're using? Plenty of people have their music stored on vfat partitions, and "?" is a wildcard on EVERY operating system. Amarok's unlikely to be changed to support illegal characters, so you might as well get used to not using them.

dangle_wtf wrote:Why should Amarok check what file system you're using?

Amarok shouldn't check which file system one is using, but it should not malfunction if it sees a "?" in a filename.

Plenty of people have their music stored on vfat partitions, and "?" is a wildcard on EVERY operating system. Amarok's unlikely to be changed to support illegal characters, so you might as well get used to not using them.

File systems don't know anything about wildcards. While your favourite shell on linux might well interpret "?" as "any character", you can perfectly generate files on most modern file systems. For example write
echo "Hello World">whocares\?.txt
and you'll have a file "whocares?.txt" on your reiserfs, ext2, ext3, jfs, ... system.

If amarok doesn't support "?" in filenames it should say so. But amarok plays those mp3s without problems. The lyrc script fetches the lyrics for such songs without problems, it displays the saved lyrics if you play that song again. The only thing that doesn't work is that you get an empty text field if you want to edit the lyrics.
So I think this is a bug in either way. Amarok should complain "Hey, you are using illegal characters in your filenames, fix it", or exery amarok function should work with files with queer names. Just having some functions not work properly with only some files dissents with the overall userfriendlyness of amarok.
Just my 0.02€

Hi,
you're right and I'm wrong. I wrote, that it's a problem of the filesystem, but what I meant was the OS. And your example doesn't work here, because you're escaping the "?" from your shell. So who should decide if a fliename like "whocares?.txt" means exactly one file or all files starting with whocares, ending up with .txt, different in one char? For me, there's a simple solution, I avoid any suspicious chars in filenames. Maybe that's because I'm using computers for a long time now. I've still problems in creating files with spaces in their names !! Ok, for me this thread doesn't lead to a solution.

Bye

m0nk