Traktor eats special characters

I know this is a long standing bug, however, it still needs to be fixed. Whenever traktor writes an id3 tag with extended or special characters it replaces the character with a blank.
For example:

Culture Kültur becomes
Culture K ltur

This problem never really affected me, because I didn't write tags with T2. However, if I want to use the analyze function, I need traktor to write the tags.

So, now I cannot do a batch analyze of all my tracks because it will mess with the names.

I do find it quite appalling that a German company does not even have support for their own language in one of their programs.

 

NI Answer on special characters

I got this message the other day from native instruments about this problem, and their answer was :

this is ridiculous, I have many many songs that have titles in other languages, including asian languages such as japanese. What am I supposed to do with the japanese ones? translate them into the equivalent english ?? this is so stupid. I have no problems with anything but traktor, when using extended characters, so i do not know how it causes other problems.


It is a fundamental flaw with traktor, and it is one of the more important ones that need to be fixed. Am i the only one who uses languages other than english ?

 

Si, tu es verdad! Tu esta persona solo que usar un otra idioma no esta igles. Lo siento.

 

I really need Swedish characters to be handled by Traktor.
I have more than 1000 tracks with Swedish characters and I find it most annoying to not see å ä ö as they should be.

/Croona

 

english

i see your point, but the only thing that comes to mind to me right now is the fact that if they start supporting more characters, that means they have to have someone working there very very familiar with all of those languages, and then you have to have someone working there in every part of tech support that understands that language. currently i dont see as much of a demand for what you want as what they can provide. they arent microsoft. they dont have as many people working there as we might wish. unless of course you are handy with the computers. make em a deal. they implement it. you work there explaining it all. lol. i think it says job opening all over it. . .

 

I believe that the actual complaint isn't having Traktor in another language. Then problem is that Traktor doesn't recognize foreign characters. You missed the example but here's another.

If you put in a track by Björk, Traktor will display Bj rk. This has nothing to do with the programmer knowing anything about special characters. It just has to do with the font set that Traktor uses. I actually find it an offense to name her Bjork - because that's not her name. Along with Beyoncé, Ultra Naté, and other artists that I have to compromise the correct spelling of their names. I wouldn't want mine spelled incorrectly....

 

clarification

I really do not care much that traktor cannot display extended characters, although it is problematic. My problem is when I analyze the tracks, and traktor writes the id3 tag, it leaves out all the special characters. So, now I have to fix all the tags on the tracks that traktor renamed. So, now, I can't just have traktor batch analyze them, I have to make sure there are no special characters in each file.

 

Thank you DrBrooks for the description of the problem .. that is exactly the problem I have with more than 1000 tracks in my collection. It's very hard to search for tracks when I have to keep in mind that all swedish characters are replaced with "blank". And it's even worse in 2.5 if the Analyze function renames the files, I haven't checked this myself yet. As I've been working as a programmer in C/C++ for more than 5 years and as a Software Product Manager for 6 years ... I find it hard to believe that this is difficult or would take more than a few hours (including verification) to implement... at least that is my opinion.

/Croona

 

My opinion:
Don't let NI mislead you to think that this longstanding Traktor bug is Apple's fault. iTunes can read these characters in MP3 tags and OS X has complete support for them in filenames. When they say that only the Mac version of Traktor does this, it is because NI has not tied into OS X correctly.

This is just one of a long list of Mac OS features that Traktor does not take advantage of, including the use of the OS-level file system so that Traktor can keep track of moved files (again, as iTunes does).

I can only guess that these bugs (and yes, they ARE bugs) are the trade-off to make simultaneous development for Mac and Win easier. No other profesional OS X application has these shortcomings.

 

Aaaarrrgghhhh...

And one more thing:

Also, the folders with non standart characters are not recognized. If I try to have a folder called "Hip hop/Rap", the mp3's inside of this, appears with the ! symbol in the track collection. If I call that folder "Hip hopRap", then all the songs appears.

Also, my mp3's are in a folder called "Música" inside of the folder "Music". If I select "Música" as the folder with the music in the preferences, click Ok and appears again and again the same box asking me for the folder. It only works if I select "Music" or if I rename "Música" with "Musica". Then, it works...

Very very bad, Native Instruments...

And please... +-8% pitch option... (or +-10%, or +-16%)

 

pitch

mine goes up to + or - 12 percent. maybe you should look around in your program before you speak . . . coughcoughtheresasliderinpreferencescoughcough . . .

 

(off topic)

@Joaquin

hint:
Traktor has Fine Pitch adjustments. You can set the Fine Pitch range in the Setup and you access it by right-clicking the Pitch Bend or Tempo Up/Down buttons.

 

Yes, yes, I know. I wrote about the pitch/tempo slider in the deck. I know I have fine pitch using the right button (in Mac Shift+click). But I don't want to use the two hands for this... and I don't have a MIDI controller (at this moment) for fine pitch.

I only ask for one or two option more. Not only +-35%, +-50% or +-100%

coughcoughtthankscoughcough . . .

Excuse for the off topic...

Something about international characters from Native?? Dr. Brooks?? Hobbes??

 

@Joaquin.

Get a 2-button (or more) mouse. Then you can right-click.

I love my Mac, but the day I gave up my 1-button mouse was the best day of life. I haven't looked back for a single second.

 

The problem I have with special/high-ASCII characters is that they prevent the song from loading at all. I often drag song files in from the Macintosh Finder and drop them on a deck. Special characters prevent the song from loading- whether they're in the file name or the MP3 tags. When I rename, they load fine.

Very sloppy.

al PowerBook 15" 1.25GHz
10.3.1 / 512 MB
TDJ 2.5.2

 

NI will soon be hiring a few more people to work on the DJ software they make.. ie: Traktor Stdio and Traktor FS. Maybe after NI has a few more programmers, then bugs such as these will be able to get fixed. New programmers = New ideas!

Hobbes

 

Hi,

This is my first post to this forum so I would like to take the opportunity to say: Thank you! To all of you who are doing this forum to what it is.

What I’m going to describe is how I’m dealing with international characters, it’s probably not the best way but it works for me. And I’m sorry if this has been “discovered” before….

1) Name my music files like this: Artist – Titel.mp3
2) Have Traktor import and analyse the files to the collection.
3) Close Traktor.
4) Now comes the tricky part because what you need to do is to build a script or a program that do a “search and replace” in the Colletion.nml file (normally located in the same folder as Traktor).
Basically you need to take the filename from the tag “File” and parse that text into tag “Artist” and “Titel”.
But before the new text get written into those fields it has to be replace with UTF-8 encoding for the international characters. This is an example:
ASCII UTF-8
å Ã¥
ä ä
ö Ã
Å Ã…
Ä Ã„
Ö Ã–
5) Save the Collection.nml file.
6) Open up Traktor again.
7) You should now have all international characters displayed correctly, you can also use Traktors built-in ID3 tag editor to add information to the MP3 file.

Note 1) this works until you start editing the ID3 tags from outside Traktor.
Note 2) place a “magic” code in any of the tags that you don’t use, for example “Producer”. To make your “search and replace” application works faster, by skipping that record.

I hope my badly write English still came across in such a way that you understand the basic principle behind it.

Best regards,
Robert

 

And, hu, what about, you know, just posting that script you use to the board?
Looks like several people would be interested.

Or are you just doing it manually for now?

 

Nico,

I have made a program that takes care of all this for me. Unfortunately I haven’t the time right now to make sure it runs safe for others. It works perfectly for me in my environment (Win 2k), but I put together to program in roughly two hours so there is no documentation and a very little error trapping in the software. It do handling backups of the file so you can always go back.

I shared this finding to al of you mostly because somebody else might find the time to do something proper with it, which also runs on MAC

If there is a high demand for it I might release it per “As Is” basis, totally without ANY kind of support and don’t blame me if something goes wrong…. But it works very well for me so far.

Best regards,
Robert

 

A year ago, Dj Hobbes wrote:

>NI will soon be hiring a few more people to work on the DJ software they
>make.. ie: Traktor Studio and Traktor FS. Maybe after NI has a few more
>programmers, then bugs such as these will be able to get fixed.



I guess not, huh? The demo of 2.5.3 still doesn't deal with the extended character set. Very odd, seeing that NI is German.



Chris