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Wiki > Main > CommonCodepageProblems

Common codepage problems


This page explains how to fix problems with song titles and filenames using non-ASCII charcaters (Hebrew, Chinese, Georgian, etc.)

Rockbox has support for many languages and scripts, but sometimes the titles and/or filenames just look like gibberish or it displays 'boxes' instead of the actual characters. These problems are usually easy to solve. There are a few things to check to get it right.

Does the selected font support your language?

Symptoms: you see 'boxes' instead of the correct characters in the file browser and in the WPS/Database

If you see 'boxes' instead of the right characters, the problem might simply be that the currently selected font doesn't have support for this language/script. Check the UnicodeFonts page to see which fonts contain non-latin glyphs and then use Rockox Theme Settings to set the desired font.

Does the rockbox codepage match the codepage of your tags?

Symptoms: the titles in the WPS/database are not displayed correctly, even with the proper font

If the titles are still not correctly displayed, the reason for this is probably that your tags are not stored in a unicode encoding (UTF-8, UTF-16) and the rockbox codepage doesn't match the one from your tags. To fix this, there are two options:

  1. change the codepage setting in rockbox to match your language (only works if all your non-unicode tags are using the same codepage)
  2. retag your files with a tag editor to unicode.
after this step, the database might need to be reinitialized.

Are the filenames stored correctly?

Symptoms: the filenames don't look right, even with the proper font

If you selected the right fonts but the file names still don't show up right, there is probably a problem with the way your operating system mounted your player when the files were copied.

In Linux: make sure that the codepage that is used to store your files is also used for mounting your drive (in a UTF-8 system use iocharset=utf8 as a mount option)

Is the problem still not solved?

If none of this has helped you to solve your problem, you can check the longer UnicodeGuide or try asking in the forums or on IRC.

r5 - 02 Apr 2021 - 20:46:06 - UnknownUser

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