As there any way to put other language text into the labels of the label track? I’m guessing the answer is “no”, but I thought I’d ask.
I have been using the File->Export Multiple… feature to export mp3 files named according to the section headings within the chapter of an AudioBook. It’s a great feature of Audacity. But, I’ve learned that the text that can be entered into these labels is quite limited (curly apostrophes, emDash, etc… are not accepted) for import/export. Therefore my guess is there’s no way symbols in foreign languages (especially non-Roman alphabet languages) would be possible.
Any chance the Label track text features could be brought into the modern era?
Labels support UTF-8, so yes you can use any valid UTF-8 characters. However, the HFS+ filesystem used by OS X requires that all filenames are stored in a normalized form (which I think is specific to Apple). For example, in an HFS+ filename, “ä” MUST be encoded as 0x61cc88, and “ö” MUST be encoded as 0x6fcc88, whereas the full UTF-8 specification supports precomposed forms of these characters that are not valid for file names on HFS+. There is some information about this in the Mac Developer Library: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/qa/qa1173/_index.html
In short, you can use UTF-8 characters in labels and file names provided that the characters are supported by the file system and comply with any additional requirements of the operating system.
Wow, I had a completely wrong idea about UTF-8. I thought it was something primitive analogous to DOS because I kept getting errors when I copied and pasted characters from Windows into Mac OSX (I run both using VMware). But it turns out UTF-8 can handle all sorts of characters from many many languages, and the Wikipedia page even says “UTF-8 is the dominant character encoding for the World Wide Web” with a plot showing it’s recent rise.
I did a test and confirmed that Audacity does produces files names having label characters from different languages when using Export Multiple…
You’ve pointed me a new direction. I’ll look into this more and try to figure out how to translate things into UTF-8, I see that there are some online conversion tools such as www.motobit.com/util/charset-codepage-conversion.asp