I am using the newly released 7.4.2 on Ubuntu Karmic (and Jaunty). I have many files with unicode (non-ascii) characters in them. When those are added to the playlist everything works fine. However, when I save the playlist the actual path to the file is mangled, so that next time when the playlist is loaded, those files can't be found and are skipped. Besides it writing out wrong encoding, the filenames also seem to be trimmed.

More information on this can be found on http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=73865 .

I have found a solution which works for me, but I don't know whether it will work in general. The patch is below. It seems that the utf8decode function does something weird there, which causes things to break. It would be great if a solution could be found by either incorporating this patch or finding another solution. Without this playlists with songs that have non-unicode characters in their filepaths are unuseable, hence marked as major.

Thanks!

--- M3U.pm      2010-02-27 18:50:42.000000000 +0000
+++ M3U.pm      2010-02-27 18:51:16.000000000 +0000
@@ -234,7 +234,7 @@
                # XXX - we still have a problem where there can be decomposed
                # unicode characters. I don't know how this happens - it's
                # coming from the filesystem.
-               my $path = Slim::Utils::Unicode::utf8decode( $class->_pathForItem($track->url, 1) );
+               my $path = Slim::Utils::Unicode::utf8on( $class->_pathForItem($track->url, 1) );
 
                print $output "$path\n";
        }