Welcome to the MNE Forum @Hadary0712 !
We’ve seen (and fixed) similar errors with our Nihon reader:
- How to fix: “UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte”
- support latin1 in annotations in nihon files by agramfort · Pull Request #9384 · mne-tools/mne-python · GitHub
- FIX: support latin1 in channels in nihon files by MatthiasEb · Pull Request #10429 · mne-tools/mne-python · GitHub
And similar CNT errors have been reported before: Error reading *.cnt eeg file
One important note is that there are 2 different file formats that both call themselves .cnt files: Neuroscan CNT data format and ANTNeuro CNT format. MNE-Python’s reader only works for Neuroscan format. We have an open issue discussing support for ANTNeuro files: ENH: import ANT Neuro .CNT files (some code available) · Issue #3609 · mne-tools/mne-python · GitHub On that thread, this comment nicely summarizes the currently available workarounds.
If you’re getting this error with a Neuroscan CNT file then what we need to be able to fix it is a sample file that causes the error, so we can locally reproduce and then debug. Can you provide such a file?