Notices

It seems Unicode tags do not work in Canola. I have some garbage displayed. Windows displays tags for the same files correctly. In fact, they do not work in built-in player either (yes, final OS2008), but there is no file name navigation, so currently there is no way to use Canola for my collection.

This is strange. N800 is positioned as international device and tags do not work.

So there are two suggestions:
1. Make it working, obviously.
2. Add an option to navigate using file name, instead of tags. See, it may be no tags, or incorrect tags.

BTW, after Canola does not rescan removable disk automatically.

Probably it's because your font is not supported. Some user reported that on garage already, we'll try to find a better font.

I do not think so. I would see boxes instead of characters, but what I see looks like that (exactly coped from one track):
"<>45;L 4;O A1>@:8"
Moreover, the same strings are displayed in the built-in Media Player. I would thing that something is wrong with my ID3 tags, but I can see them correctly in both Windows Explorer and some other tags editor.

It would be explained, if Canola uses some system component for parsing tags, which (as most of OS2008) is full of bugs.

And, please, add a navigation using file names. There are so many ways of navigation, just one more. And it would solve all the problems with unreadable tags.

@vtolkov: which encoding are you using for this files, UTF-8? Canola uses LightMediaScanner, and today we have just configured UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1 (latin-1), so maybe, if you have something outside these two, it may cause problems... however they should show as "?", not garbage. Maybe you could mail me one of these tracks so I can test it here and possible fix the bug? My mail is barbieri at google mail services (gmail, damn spammers).

glad to hear it support UTF-8 encode.
Is it released yet? Do I have to uninstall the current version and reinstall or their is a patch for that?

I've converted and tried a short wav sample, converted by Lame into mp3. I've tried different formats. AFAIK, UTF-8 is available only at ID3 v2.4, which, seems, currently is not supported at all. If I choose v2.4 tags, they are not displayed. So I've used ID3 v2.3 with UTF-16 encoding. The sample can be found at http://tolkov.com/valery/scream.mp3 (about 10K).

In fact, I've used tag editor from www.mp3tag.de, and tried different combinations with the same result. Personally, I need Cyrillic Unicode range, other applications support it quite fine.

BTW, Happy Xmas.

Well, I don't think there's been enough testing on OS2008 yet to tell what's been fixed or newly broken, but the OS2007 media libraries choked on several things: 1) Unicode in tags, 2) Embedded cover art, 3) multiple versions of tags in one file. I found the best thing to do was use a tool like MP3Tag to eliminate 1) and 2) and only write out the latest tag version (v3.3 I think?). Unicode support may have improved in OS2008, but wouldn't bet on it.

Well, as I see, it is not improved, it is entirely broken. The latest v2.4, which is not supported at all. v2.3 displays garbage instead of non-ASCII characters. All others version do not support Unicode.

yep it so
but there is no such problem with mpd + mmpc
https://garage.maemo.org/projects/mpd/

ID3 v2.3 supports ISO-8859-1 and UTF-16, while v2.4 also supports UTF-8 (which is much more common).
However, this only means that the spec specifies a byte for marking the encoding as such. In the end it's up to the tagging program what encoding to write.