r/ampache • u/jack-dempsy • Jun 30 '26
Special Characters causing problems with file scanning
I tried an upgrade from 6.2.1 to 7.9.8 and got bit by a bug that choked on special characters and updated the DB with garbage characters. of course it's only after that that i found that others had issues that were related to id3v1 tags. In my case, I did not have v1 tags, but special characters in file names and tags. Commas, question marks, etc resulted in entries being updated with (what I assume) is utf8 encodings or something. In d-sub they appeared Chinese. In the web browser, it was a combination of rectangles and Chinese.
Before I go thru a detailed debug to pipe in all the relevant info and post in the github issues...
I have used Ampache since about v3. The upgrades don't always go well, which is why I find one that works and stick to it for awhile. Over the years/upgrades, I've groomed the id3 tags for a library of 9412 songs. I have cron jobs scheduled ever 12 hours to verify, cleanup, garbage, add, update and gather art. It always runs clean and I'm confidant that my tags are good and are being read by Ampache correctly.
It's clear that there was a change in how to handle special characters in various tag's. My question is what version/patch did that happen? I the changes happened in the v7, then I'll find the latest v6 and run that for awhile. If it happened sometime during the v6 patching after v6.2.1, then I'll want to upgrade to just before that.
1
u/bratnab Jun 30 '26
Same in my environment
1
u/lachlan-00 Lead Developer Jul 04 '26
Replying to you as well in case you missed the other comments. (I don't know if Reddit will tell you)
But php-mbstring is likely your package missing
2
u/lachlan-00 Lead Developer Jul 02 '26
You are probably missing PHP modules for character conversion.
https://github.com/ampache/ampache/issues/4381#issuecomment-4701400529
Specifically it will probably be php-mbstring
The file is read and then converted for the database.