[SOLVED] Japanese .wav titles appearing as question marks (not a VLC translation error, I don't think)

[astinad]

EDIT: Solved this on my own, gonna leave this thread be so people can see the trail of breadcrumbs I left in how I arrived at my solution, maybe it will help others. Skip down to my last post in this thread for the solution.

Hi there lovely folks!

I recently purchased the official Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening soundtrack (a set of 4 audio CDs) from Japan, and successfully ripped them into .wav files that play back great. The tracks all understandably have Japanese characters in the .wav titles. When I import them into my VLC media player, version 3.0.20 Vetinari, for a brief fraction of a second it seems like it correctly displays the Japanese characters but quickly changes them to question marks. See this gif I saved so you can see the behavior I'm describing for yourself: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iuhdjm ... sp=sharing

Apologies if this is the wrong forum, I didn't think that this qualified as a "translation" error because I'm not actually interested in changing my media player's default language, I just want it to display these tracks in their Japanese characters.

I've tried the following after searching these forums and on Superuser:

• Changing my system font to one that supports Japanese characters in Preferences > Subtitles / OSD > Font. By default it was set to "Adobe Song Std L" which does appear to support Japanese characters. I tried changing to a system language that supports Japanese characters like MS Gothic, and that didn't help either. I get the same behavior no matter what font I select.
• Changing the property "Change title according to current media" located in Advanced Preferences > Input / Codes > Advanced from "$Z" to "$F", which didn't work, and then to "$u" which also didn't work.

I'm not sure what to do because as you can see in the gif, upon initial import for just a fraction of a second the characters are appearing in the Playlist view, but then quickly changes them all to question marks as if they suddenly can't recognize the titles. Any ideas here? Thank you so much for reading! I am not an expert on VLC's settings.

[astinad]

Here is what the Messages window shows with Verbosity set to debug, shortened for clarity but this pattern repeats for every track:

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main debug: Creating an input for preparsing '10 メーベの村.wav' main debug: Creating an input for preparsing '11 ふしぎの森.wav' main debug: looking for art finder module matching "any": 2 candidates lua debug: Trying Lua scripts in C:\Users\Mike\AppData\Roaming\vlc\lua\meta\art lua debug: Trying Lua scripts in C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\lua\meta\art lua debug: Trying Lua playlist script C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\lua\meta\art\00_musicbrainz.luac lua debug: skipping script (unmatched scope) C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\lua\meta\art\00_musicbrainz.luac lua debug: Trying Lua playlist script C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\lua\meta\art\01_googleimage.luac lua debug: skipping script (unmatched scope) C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\lua\meta\art\01_googleimage.luac lua debug: Trying Lua playlist script C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\lua\meta\art\02_frenchtv.luac lua debug: skipping script (unmatched scope) C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\lua\meta\art\02_frenchtv.luac lua debug: Trying Lua playlist script C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\lua\meta\art\03_lastfm.luac lua debug: skipping script (unmatched scope) C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\lua\meta\art\03_lastfm.luac main debug: no art finder modules matched main debug: Creating an input for preparsing '12 木の実.wav' main debug: looking for art finder module matching "any": 2 candidates lua debug: Trying Lua scripts in C:\Users\Mike\AppData\Roaming\vlc\lua\meta\art lua debug: Trying Lua scripts in C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\lua\meta\art lua debug: Trying Lua playlist script C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\lua\meta\art\00_musicbrainz.luac lua debug: skipping script (unmatched scope) C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\lua\meta\art\00_musicbrainz.luac lua debug: Trying Lua playlist script C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\lua\meta\art\01_googleimage.luac lua debug: skipping script (unmatched scope) C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\lua\meta\art\01_googleimage.luac lua debug: Trying Lua playlist script C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\lua\meta\art\02_frenchtv.luac lua debug: skipping script (unmatched scope) C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\lua\meta\art\02_frenchtv.luac lua debug: Trying Lua playlist script C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\lua\meta\art\03_lastfm.luac lua debug: skipping script (unmatched scope) C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\lua\meta\art\03_lastfm.luac main debug: no art finder modules matched main debug: Creating an input for preparsing '13 おみせ (アイテム、魔法おばば).wav' main debug: looking for art finder module matching "any": 2 candidates ...

[astinad]

One thing I'm noticing right off the bat is that the path "C:\Users\Mike\AppData\Roaming\vlc\lua\meta\art" doesn't exist on my hard drive.

C:\Users\Mike\AppData\Roaming\vlc\ directory contains the following files, notice how there is no "lua" folder within the "vlc" folder:

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PS C:\Users\Mike\AppData\Roaming\vlc> dir Directory: C:\Users\Mike\AppData\Roaming\vlc Mode LastWriteTime Length Name ---- ------------- ------ ---- d----- 21/07/23 11:01 PM art d----- 21/07/06 1:08 AM crashdump -a---- 24/09/28 11:44 AM 304 ml.xspf -a---- 24/09/28 11:50 AM 13302 vlc-qt-interface.ini -a---- 24/09/28 11:44 AM 96894 vlcrc

[astinad]

However, it does appear that the "Program Files" paths are accurate:

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PS C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\lua\meta\art> dir Directory: C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\lua\meta\art Mode LastWriteTime Length Name ---- ------------- ------ ---- -a---- 23/10/30 1:56 AM 2965 00_musicbrainz.luac -a---- 23/10/30 1:56 AM 1457 01_googleimage.luac -a---- 23/10/30 1:56 AM 4392 02_frenchtv.luac -a---- 23/10/30 1:56 AM 1655 03_lastfm.luac

[astinad]

And unfortunately I can't parse these scripts, they appear to be precompiled binary files:

[astinad]

It must not be related to these precompiled scripts anyway since the message log is saying that it's skipping all of these scripts for each track.. I wish I could figure this out on my own. Would greatly appreciate any help! Cheers

[astinad]

Ok.. this is getting weirder. If I copy and paste the wav. file name to another wave file name, those japanese characters do not appear as question marks... for example I have a pink noise wave file that I use to test speakers on, and I went ahead and copied the first Zelda track name and added it to the end of my pink sample wave file name.

[astinad]

Figured this out, the root cause problem was that VLC always reads metadata that's already embedded in a wav file. Unfortunately the user has no way of telling VLC to ignore that embedded metadata or to simply display the file name separately from the title metadata tag.

I hate when other people suggest media metadata editor programs that I've never heard of that seem sketchy to download, so I made a video explaining how I used Reaper which is a free download to bulk edit my metadata so that the various "???" title metadata tags are removed from all the files in a directory. Here is the video: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ecAW_Q ... sp=sharing

This whole thread though and necessity to edit the metadata from a ripped commercial CD could be avoided if VLC had a working option to ignore existing metadata and simply display the filenames instead of Title in the Playlist view. I've read online anecdotally that VLC devs are apparently against this idea? Or maybe they don't view it as worth their time?

Such an option I would think would be really welcome to this community of VLC users. Makes me want to consider contributing so I can make this option a reality. It's unknown though if it would survive a code review if VideoLAN devs are simply against this idea for reasons. I'll edit the title of this thread as solved, hopefully this helps someone else from spinning their wheels on this.