Hallo,

I've written a Python script, which exports cover images from Amarok to the album directory and sets them as directory icon. Nothing particularly useful, but quite fancy and eye-candy. The script queries the Amarok MySQL database to get a list of existing albums, together with their cover images and their directories.

Currently the script simply assumes UTF-8 encoded data in the database. This works for me, but other users, whose Amarok database contains a mixture of UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1 encoded metadata, have reported problems. Apparently the Amarok database contains arbitrarily encoded data, probably simply copied directly from the ID3 tags.

Nevertheless, in all of these cases Amarok itself displayed the track names correctly, so Amarok can apparently decode this data correctly. How does Amarok do this? How does it detect the encoding of Album metadata? Can any developer shed some light on this? I'd like to mirror Amarok's behaviour in my script to get it working for the affected users.

Thanks in advance,
lunar