Japanese characters not showing up in playlists

2012-07-09 05:23:20

Those square boxes are supposed to be Japanese characters, as shown by the file properties box.

I don't know when my foobar suddenly stopped being able to display Japanese characters, but I'm fairly certain that it used to be able to.

I MAY have changed the font which would be the cause of this -- and for that I ask is it possible for the characters to be rendered but in a different font if that is the case?

Quick test: I went into microsoft paint and attempted to type in Japanese with the font used in my playlist and it automatically switched to a different font (Meiryo) to compensate for the lack of Japanese support in my font. Is this possible in foobar? Why does paint do it?

Japanese characters not showing up in playlists

Reply #1 – 2012-07-09 05:30:58

It does it automatically already if you have the language support installed (which you appear to), but the automatic substitution seems to stop working after something odd happens, like installing more fonts or such. Try logging out of your user account and logging back in.

Japanese characters not showing up in playlists

Reply #2 – 2012-07-09 05:49:11

Aha! You were right! Relogging in fixed it. Thank you -- now I ask -- why? And what might have triggered that (I hadn't installed any new fonts)

Japanese characters not showing up in playlists

Reply #3 – 2012-07-09 06:10:41

It may have something to do with some GDI resource leakage, which is session-wide, and thus may be triggered by and also affect many different applications in different ways.

One popular application I know of that leaks GDI Objects on a regular basis is the Steam client, but usually only if you have private chat windows open. In that case, some aspect of the window, which I have guessed to be related to the soft shadows which change size depending on the window focus, are leaked as system level windows which are recreated repeatedly. One way to replicate the leak is to create a private chat window with two or more tabs, then hold control-tab and observe the GDI Objects count climb in Task Manager, until it hits the application limit of 10,000, at which point Steam stops functioning properly until you close the chat window. Closing an affected chat window causes the leaked windows to be destroyed properly. Also, it does not seem to affect group chat windows.

It is possible to check which processes have excessive numbers of handles (more than a thousand or so) by opening the Task Manager, switching to the Processes tab, then enabling the GDI Objects column from the View menu, under Select Columns.

I'm not sure if that's in any way related to the problem, I'm just throwing out guesses, since the font substitution that normally takes place in foobar2000 is a function of GDI and/or GDI+.

Japanese characters not showing up in playlists

Reply #4 – 2012-07-09 06:32:04

I see, I see. Looking at my GDI Objects, two are notable -- Volume2.exe which is my custom volume button thing, which is at 1164 objects, and VDeck.exe, which is my audio driver I think, at 904 GDI Objects.

However, Volume2.exe seems to start at 1164 and stay there, it doesn't increase in amount as time passes, so perhaps that's not the problem, but VDeck.exe is? I've had trouble with memory leakage with my audio driver in the past (audiodg.exe using TONS of memory) so I'm more inclined to say that's the problem.