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Fix encoding issues on Windows

theGreatWhiteShark edited this page Apr 7, 2024 · 1 revision

Problem

Hydrogen fails to open songs with non-ASCII characters in file name or path on Windows.

What's going wrong?

When starting Hydrogen by double-clicking a song file or when using the -s or -p command line options the path of the particular file is handed to Hydrogen using the system's encoding. If the encoding is e.g. windows-2151 and the file name or path contains e.g. Cyrillic or Japanese characters, all non-Latin-1 characters are lost and Hydrogen has no way to determine the correct path of the song and won't be able to open it.

Solution

You have to enforce UTF-8 encoding on your system. (Which is most probably a very good idea anyway since you are using non-ASCII filesnames).

Open Preferences and enter Time & Language settings

utf8-1

Select Language

utf8-2

Select Administrative language settings

utf8-3

Select Change system locale...

utf8-4

Activate Use Unicode UTF-8 for worldwide language support

utf8-5