M3 doesn't display Chinese song names when "Language" is English

wpyh · 01-17-2008

Anyone here from China? My M3 does not display Chinese song names correctly when I set the Language option in the Settings menu to English. If I set it to 简体中文 (Simplified Chinese), I can see the song names correctly.

How to reproduce:
1. Set Language to Chinese.
2. Play a Chinese song (a song with Chinese name / tags).
3. Set Language to English (no need to quit playing the song).
4. Go back to the Now Playing song.
5. Right now the song name is still displayed with Chinese characters.
6. Skip a few songs.
7. The songs with Chinese names are now displayed with weird characters.

Anyone has got a workaround for this?

nice2know_u · 01-17-2008

I think that's because the English language uses Unicode characters and doesn't have chinese characters. Maybe if you open the resource.bin with the Resource Editor and replace the Chinese with English it will be okay. Correct me if I'm wrong.

wpyh · 01-17-2008

But why does the player not display the first Chinese song (after the Language is changed) as garbled characters? I think there is some caching involved here.

Thanks for the suggestion. I think a good workaround would be to make an "English" language entry, but with a Unicode font (or a Chinese font), and at the same time with English menu.

I miss the E3... it has separate settings for the system language and song display languages.

Err0r · 01-17-2008

I think it depends on how the song ID3 is encoded (unicode or not).

Try doing this: In your Control Panel, under Regional Settings, set Chinese as the language to use for non-unicode programs. Then re-tag the songs.

wpyh · 01-17-2008

Uhh... I'm using Linux :D

I tagged my songs not in Unicode but in GBK, so that might be the problem. I'll try to re-tag some songs with Unicode and report back.

By the way, I downloaded the Resource Editor (onto another PC) and opened the resource.bin file. I can see the strings for the different languages (maybe 10+ languages!!), but:
1. Only 3 languages (Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and English) are displayed on the player itself.
2. There is no option to add new languages.
3. The language names are not displayed. It's only lang1, lang2, lang3, ...

Got any idea to add new languages? Or do we have to edit the firmware itself?

nice2know_u · 01-17-2008

You have to edit one of the existing languages: English, Chinese Simplified, or Chinese Traditional.

wpyh · 01-17-2008

I formatted the player and reloaded the firmware, then copied a Chinese album onto it. The album is tagged in Unicode. I set the language to English, and the album is still displayed correctly in Chinese! Thanks Err0r!

nice2know_u:
I'm a Linux user, and as you would probably have known... well, Linux users are lazy :P If we can automate something, we will!

So, I opened the resource with Resource Editor (again) and tried copying the whole column for English to Simplified Chinese, and it didn't work. Resource Editor has no such function. I can manually type in the words one-by-one, but it's very tedious, so... I'm looking for a way to automate the whole process.

Is the resource file format publicly known? If so, maybe I can write some script to automatically copy the language over.

believe · 01-27-2008

...输入中文你们能看到吗.?

i agree that.

my music card also like it .....郁闷

i am a chinese.. my english is not very good ...Uhh... 郁闷囖..

wpyh · 01-28-2008

我可以看到你输入的中文。

Now I can correctly view Chinese artist, song and album names correctly if I encode them in UTF-8, as I said above. You should try it too.

Rayz · 02-06-2008

i gta have a try...
my english is poor too...-_-

THK · 02-06-2008

I have the opposite problem: M3 (with the latest 2004.5 fw) is set to English menu, but I get Chinese characters instead of some (not all) Hungarian acuted characters.
I did not try to re-tag songs yet, but those were OK before firmware upgrade, so I think it should be possible with this version as well.

volk · 04-06-2008

Hi there,

Is there any software which can do the re-tag or re-encode in UTF-8?

What about from Traditional Chinese to Simplified Chinese? I also have problem with files which are in Traditional Chinese, but when I selected Language to Simplified Chinese, the words are different

i1fang · 09-03-2008

open the resource.bin, edit the simp chinese field to english wordings.
so the player will be able to read unicode, while display english menu