Exporting music list with foreign characters

Posted by: Gajdzin on 23 March 2014

OK, I searched thoroughly this forum (and Google) for exporting a NAS music database to Excel, but I can only find advice about Media Monkey and TagScanner. Unfortunately both don't understand foreign characters - they export a series of question marks. I have many Japanese and Russian CDs, so it's both double-byte characters and Cyrillic. They are both in tags (Album Artist, Album, etc.) and in the directory and file names on the NAS.

Any advice most appreciated...

Posted on: 23 March 2014 by Gajdzin

Isn't it embarrassing when you find an answer yourself? But instead of deleting the original post before anyone replies I'm going to explain the solution, in case somebody has the same problem in future. It's not the TagScanner that cannot export foreign characters, it's Excel that's stripping them when opening. The solution is to:

1. export to a CSV file

2. manually change that file's extension from CSV to TXT

3. open the file Excel as semicolon delimited database

A bit of a hassle, but I hope I'll only have to do it when buying and adding new CDs. Also, can't figure out how to export only albums, I think TagScanner can only export the entire list of all songs. Which means having to write a macro in Excel that will find duplicates (e.g. 13 instances of the same album because it has 13 songs) and remove all but the first one. Now that's going to be a lot of hassle... If anyone knows a better way, I'll appreciate a hint.