When trying to extract digital audio with K3b from an arabic or korean (for example) music CD - the titles and the name of the artist appear in garbled characters. What do I need to do to have the tiles appear as arabic or hangul script?

Do you use UTF-16 encoding or ISO? UTF-16 should display correctly.

Mamarok wrote:Do you use UTF-16 encoding or ISO? UTF-16 should display correctly.

Thank you for your reply to my post. I am not programming K3b. I understand how to set UTF-16 in HTML etc but in this instance I am trying to extract digital audio using K3b from a Syrian CD. Unfortunately, all the Syrian characters for the track titles appear as garbled code (eg; "(F* 5:J1J +J")
I don't want to set my system default language to Arabic in order to do this. I have the same problem with Asian music CDs. So is there a way to instruct the system or that particular program to render the titles with UTF-16? I do not find anything in the program settings.
K3b Version 19.04.3 KDE Frameworks 5.67.0
Qt 5.13.2 (built against 5.13.2)
KDE Plasma Version 5.17.5
Kernel 5.5.8-200.fc31.x86_64

You need to install the proper fonts to display the characters correctly, though, and your system should use UTF-16. No need to program anything, just set your system up so the display works.

Mamarok wrote:You need to install the proper fonts to display the characters correctly, though, and your system should use UTF-16. No need to program anything, just set your system up so the display works.

Yes - I have the fonts installed but how does one set a linux system to UTF-16 (as it normally uses UTF-8) - without breaking things (terminal etc)?

why would that break the terminal? I mainly suggest using UTF-16 instead of UTF-8 because the CDs from Asia are often made on Windows computers that either use old ISO encodings or use UTF-16, as this was an easier upgrade for many programs from UCS-2.
Make sure to set the LC* locale components, as this is also a likely cause for garbled displays.

Mamarok wrote:why would that break the terminal? I mainly suggest using UTF-16 instead of UTF-8 because the CDs from Asia are often made on Windows computers that either use old ISO encodings or use UTF-16, as this was an easier upgrade for many programs from UCS-2.
Make sure to set the LC* locale components, as this is also a likely cause for garbled displays.

Thanks Mamarok and excuse me for being a bit slow but I have no idea how to change the system to UTF-!6 from UTF-8 and I have asked how this may be done in previous posts. According to this link it cannot be done:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/365 ... e/36592733

I tried adding the Arabic-Syrian setting in addition to the US but it then turns the font in the terminal to arabic but not the CD track titles. Also I do not wish to set Arabic as the default language on my system - just only to see the CD tracks in arabic script instead of garbled characters. If there is a way to convert the system to UTF-16 or even have it load as an option - would be grateful if you would explain how.

There, I learned something.

Anyway, I checked with the little Japanese Music I have on my computer and it all displays correctly, but that is just because I have all the necessary fonts installed.
I know from experience that CDs can have pretty garbled fonts as many are made on machines running some old Windows still encoded in ISO. What I usually do is having a go at renaming those with a look up at MusicBrainz. No need to type, copy-paste should just work. You could also run Kid3 or Picard over it once you have ripped it to correct this, provided the CDs are in the databases used by either of these taggers.

Mamarok wrote:There, I learned something.

Anyway, I checked with the little Japanese Music I have on my computer and it all displays correctly, but that is just because I have all the necessary fonts installed.
I know from experience that CDs can have pretty garbled fonts as many are made on machines running some old Windows still encoded in ISO. What I usually do is having a go at renaming those with a look up at MusicBrainz. No need to type, copy-paste should just work. You could also run Kid3 or Picard over it once you have ripped it to correct this, provided the CDs are in the databases used by either of these taggers.

Yes - I had already tried that but it does not work with these more esoteric CDs which are not in any database, yet - unfortunately.