Bug 145828

Version:           1.4.5 (using KDE KDE 3.5.5)
Installed from:    Gentoo Packages
OS:                Linux

Amarok seems to handle file name conversions badly when transferring files to a generic audio player. In particular, umlauts are converted to their German 2-character equivalents by the cleanPath function in app.cpp.

These conversions are not a universal way of converting such characters. Replacement of characters such as ä->ae and ö->oe is specific to the German language, but the characters are used in other languages as well. In Finnish and Estonian, for example, ae and oe are diphthongs with their own meanings. There's a short discussion on the matter at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umlaut_%28diacritic%29. (I believe if the file name conversion is absolutely necessary, ä/å->a and ö->o would be more desirable, at least in Finnish. However, this is probably something that should be handled by proper character set conversion libraries instead of ad-hoc replacement tables in app.cpp.)

Moreover, it seems that the cleanPath conversion is used in cases where it's not actually needed. My player (iPod running Rockbox) uses VFAT and has no problem using extended character sets, yet Amarok automatically sanitizes the filenames anyway!