Thursday, December 23, 2010

Subsonic on Linux: Fix issue with special characters

Subsonic is quite amazing, but I encountered problems with songs that contain special characters like umlauts or japanese kanjis. For one, the web-interface doesn't display them correctly and second - even more serious - clients like ones available for the iPhone show errors or even crash when accessing such songs.

The problem is that subsonic requires the correct language/encoding set when run. It seems that it needs UTF-8 set as encoding.

To do this, modify the start-script of the subsonic-server (usually /usr/share/subsonic/subsonic.sh) and add the following line to the beginning:

export LANG=en_US.UTF-8


then restart the daemon. The web-interface should now display everything correctly and Clients like iSub on the iPhone should be able to play all songs aswell.