Unable to see some Russian id3 tags in ncmpc

Question

I'm running urxvt with the current env:

$ env | grep LC
LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

The problem is either with ncurses or ncmpc and I was wondering if anyone could shed some light on what the problem might be. This could also be an issue with the ID3 tags and any advice on working with broken or misconfigured encoding settings in meta tags in mp3 files is also welcome. I have been ignoring this matter for years and it has finally gotten to me. The bizarre thing is that some filenames or tags work, while others do not.

What I have tried the following:

• setting LC_ALL to these values (whatever is before the space)

  • ru_RU.KOI8-R KOI8-R
    
  • ru_RU.UTF-8 UTF-8
    
  • ru_RU ISO-8859-5
    
    

• rebuilding the MPD database with

  • id3v1_encoding "ISO-8859-1"
    or
    
  • id3v1_encoding "UTF-8"

I can demonstrate the problem with two screen shots, as it's the easiest way to do so:

Expected output (mpc works well):

Broken encoding (ncmpc):

Ncmpcpp: same problem

Answer 1

From the second screenshot, it looks like ncmpcpp outputs valid UTF-8, but your terminal does not expect it.

Find out the PID of your terminal emulator, then run

cat /proc/<PID>/environ | tr \\0 \\n | egrep "LANG|LC"

If it shows something different than your current locale, then you're likely setting $LANG/$LC_ALL in the wrong place. For example, .bashrc won't work because it is not applied to the X11 session, only to programs inside a terminal – .profile or .xprofile would be better.

In fact, setting $LC_ALL permanently is not recommended – just LANG=en_US.UTF-8 should be enough. (Try to avoid ISO-8859 or KOI8-R settings.)