Unicode Solution

[Thruba]

Since I am Greek and I have several LP's and CD's in my native language, my only problem with Music Label was that when I put Greek text in the artist, title or track entries, it showed up as unreadable garbage on the main window. I have bothered Johan several times about unicode support, but as he told me, this is something to be considered in the .Net edition of the program. Accidentally, though, I have found a solution to the problem and decided to share it with all of you non-English people. It requires just a little tampering with windows registry, so if it scares you wait for the .net edition of Music Label. Here it is:

1. Start registry editor (open run, type regedit, enter) and follow the path
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Nls\CodePage.
2. Find "1252" and doubleclick it to open.
3. In the window that opens, value name "1252" has value data "c_1252.nls".
4. Replace "c_1252.nls" with the codepage for your language (for Greek I changed it to "c_1253.nls"). The microsoft codepage referals are:

* 1250 — East European Latin
* 1251 — Cyrillic
* 1252 — West European Latin
* 1253 — Greek
* 1254 — Turkish
* 1255 — Hebrew
* 1256 — Arabic
* 1257 — Baltic
* 1258 — Vietnamese

Basically, what you do is change the West European Latin codepage to your own language.
5. Quit registry editor and restart your computer. Then you must be able to see your language inside Music Label.

It doesn't affect the way other programs work. Anyway, it works fine for the Greek language. Please, give feedback if it works fine for other languages too.

Thanks for your attention

[johan.p]

Thank for this input. I have posted a link to this post in the Support Area.

[thanos]

This hint worked for winxp but it doesn't work in windows vista (ultimate).
As far as Greek fonts is concerned I get perfect characters in the tracks bar, artist window, treeview and when I open an entry, however I get the wrong characters in the main entries window.

[Thruba]

According to Firebird 2.0.1 release notes:

About Firebird 2.0.x

Several limitations inherited from the legacy code have now gone, such as the 252-byte limit on index size and sub-optimal usage of index statistics that could throttle performance. Table size is no longer limited to 30 Gb.

Indexing has undergone a thorough reworking to ramp up performance and reduce or eliminate the effects of poor selectivity.

An important feature is the introduction of a new interface for plugging in international character sets, including enhanced Unicode support, along with a number of new and corrected collations.

Firebird 2.0 now supports 64-bit platforms with released binaries available for AMD64 and Intel EM64T on Linux. Windows 64-bit builds are ready for testing and will follow in a sub-release.

Several aspects of server security have received an intense makeover, with a large number of known vulnerabilities in the API being closed along the way.

Porting of the Services API to Classic architecture is now complete. All Services API functions are now available on both Linux and Windows Classic servers, with no limitations.

Maybe the language problem that many people face, will be solved if the program allows you to choose the language of the database before it is created.

So, what do you say Johan? Is this something that could be easily added to the current version of your programs?

[johan.p]

According to Firebird 2.0.1 release notes:

About Firebird 2.0.x

Several limitations inherited from the legacy code have now gone, such as the 252-byte limit on index size and sub-optimal usage of index statistics that could throttle performance. Table size is no longer limited to 30 Gb.

Indexing has undergone a thorough reworking to ramp up performance and reduce or eliminate the effects of poor selectivity.

An important feature is the introduction of a new interface for plugging in international character sets, including enhanced Unicode support, along with a number of new and corrected collations.

Firebird 2.0 now supports 64-bit platforms with released binaries available for AMD64 and Intel EM64T on Linux. Windows 64-bit builds are ready for testing and will follow in a sub-release.

Several aspects of server security have received an intense makeover, with a large number of known vulnerabilities in the API being closed along the way.

Porting of the Services API to Classic architecture is now complete. All Services API functions are now available on both Linux and Windows Classic servers, with no limitations.

Maybe the language problem that many people face, will be solved if the program allows you to choose the language of the database before it is created.

So, what do you say Johan? Is this something that could be easily added to the current version of your programs?

The database is no problem since everything is stored correctly in the database (and always have). The problem is the interface and how it is displayed in Windows. Different codepages will still be needed until the switch to Unicode is made.