Hi,
I’ve been using Plexamp as my main audio player on my iPhone for the last few months and I’m absolutely loving the experience. One thing that is really annoying though is that I can’t play any songs, albums or artists with special characters such as the German “ö,ä,ü,ß” or French “ç”. Playing them via the normal Plex App is possible, Plexamp refuses to even display those media files (on iOS, Windows and MacOS).
Is this a known bug?
Thanks in advance for any help!
Hi @lemonistas,
I suspect the server might be incorrectly encoding some of these characters, and Plexamp can be a bit more fussy about character encoding than the other Plex apps. Any chance you could share a copy of the XML of one of the tracks you experience this issue with?
See here for instructions on sharing the XML:
Investigate Media Information and Formats | Plex Support
Cheers!
Hi @aubrey.wodonga,
Thanks for the reply!
This is the XML media information code of one of the tracks with French characters:
special_characters.txt (2.5 KB)
Apologies for the delay, it’s a busy time of year!
I had a quick look at your XML, thanks for posting it. The first thing that stands out to me is it looks like you’re still using the old metadata system, which was replaced with a significantly improved system in June 2019. Before troubleshooting any further, I’d recommend reading through the below article and upgrading your library to the new system. Plexamp was made to make the most of the new metadata:
If you have already upgraded, the metadata in the track XML you provided refers to the old last.fm IDs. You may need to refresh your library’s metadata.
Let’s continue troubleshooting once you’ve resolved the above, though I have a sneaking suspicion that fixing the metadata may resolve your issue with character encoding.
Happy new year!
Thank you very much for the suggestions. I’ve upgraded the metadata as described.
Unfortunately, that didn’t fix the character encoding issues. I spent some hours troubleshooting and finally found the problem: since I’m accessing the files on a samba share on a NAS, there were encoding issues connected with the shares. Things got more complicated, since I’m running plex media server on a Nvidia Jetson Nano with aarch64 as architecture and Linux kernel 4.9 with apparently no UTF-8 encoding kernel module and consequently errors when forcing the cifs client to use UTF-8. I was thinking of compiling the necessary module and rebuilding the kernel but came up with a much simpler solution. I switched to NFS as a network share protocol and that apparently resolved my issue. 
I’ll report back once I’ve updated all files.
Great to hear you’ve found a solution! Let me know how it goes.
As hoped switching from CIFS to NFS as file sharing protocol resolved all my encoding issues.
Thanks again for the advice on how to display the file meta data.
Hi, I’ve got what seems to be a similar situation, but if a new post is warranted, let me know. I’ve recently found 2 albums that won’t load any info for them when I go to view the album within Plexamp on iOS. Plex on iOS, Plexamp on Mac, and Plex web app on Mac all show the albums correctly, but within Plexamp on iOS when I go into the album, it just spins, and never loads any info. It displays the album title and image from search or the library view ok. The albums are Tool’s Undertow and Ænima, and both have some unicode characters, but I tried manually removing those from within Plex, no change. I attached a track XML. Any other debugging tips? I’ve got it set to use local metadata, and the albums have been tagged with MusicBrainz’s Picard.
tool - eulogy 324751.xml.txt (3.9 KB)
Screenshot on iOS Plexamp of album view
Thanks!
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