Stereo Tool

Hi,

I am trying to use umlauts in the radiotext field (through \f"...") and they seem to be ignored, regardless whether I use latin1 or utf-8 encoding. For a german radio station, umlauts are quite essential to capture the variety of the German alphabet when being used in song titles and band names. Any idea how to solve this issue?

Bye
Alex

Are they completely ignored or replaced by spaces?

Ow. I might have found it. In my code I read all the characters in the file, and check if they are >= ' '. (To ignore control characters). However, I'm using a 'char' which is by definition signed... Which would mean that all ASCII-codes above 127 will be ignored.

Fix should be included in the next version... (Cannot build one right now because I'm in the middle of a change and the current work-in-progress version is broken; I hope to have something tomorrow or the day after).

When I enter the character by hand, they are shown as spaces (might be a quirk of Wine (which runs ST quite fine for testing btw), though), and if I put them into the file, they are skipped.

Hm ok. That probably means that there are 2 things that are going wrong. First is that the characters in a file are completely ignored - and that should be fixed now (next beta). I'll have to check the RDS spec to see why characters are replaced by spaces though.

Or maybe it was just the font on Wine that did not have the umlauts (I do not have stereotool yet integrated into the broadcasting chain, so I can't tell whether it works with a normal radio receiver). But I will see how well it works next week.

BTW, how often is the RDS-File read when specified with \f...?

And another unrelated question - I am seeing a calculated latency information text on every output settings page. Interestingly, the latency for the "Low Latency output" and the normal output read the same (both ~100 ms). Is that a bug (I hope so!)?

Ok, please let me know - in the old version indeed ASCII characters above 127 were ignored, if you get one of the (I'll post a new one tonight) 7.02 beta that's fixed.

About latency: Hm, ow, that would indeed be a bug! Low latency processing latency is about 6 ms, in total 11 must be reachable.

Hans, I am curious to know the answer to this question:
I mean how often a file that is "imported" via the RDS specification is polled for updates.

Ow sorry. Each time when the RDS sequence is repeated.

About the umlauts: I would check it myself if I could, but I lost my test transmitter somewhere...

Beware that the RDS character set is neither latin-1 nor UTF-8. It is described in Annex E of European Standard EN50067:1998, a document that can be a pain to find and if you do find it, is often incomplete and/or cost money.
Fortunately the same information is found in the US RBDS standards document (page 91), available here: ftp://ftp.rds.org.uk/pub/acrobat/rbds1998.pdf
These are the umlauts I use:

Latin-1    RDS character code
á          128
Á          192
ü          153
Ü          217
É          194
é          130
å          241
Å          225
ä          145
Ä          209
ö          151
Ö          215
'          39

Example: "Nürnberg" would have to be written "N™rnberg" in order to show up correctly on a radio's display.

--
Ragnar

Does this mean that us users have to encode the string in the RDS encoding?