Why was the character set override option removed?

[Hans Ecke]

> The real reason that makers have so much inertia is that implementing modern 
> Unicode support is difficult, and tag library authors don't want to bother.    

Oh, tell me about it. I have to deal with unicode encodings too (at my 
dayjob) and its a major pain in the behind. Of course, the alternatives 
are even worse. If people ask me about it, I always tell them to try and 
stick with ASCII (characters < 128) if at all possible...

> So when you're writing a media application, it puts you in a bit of a bind, so 
> far as international character support goes.  Support the old standard using 
> UTF-16 that other apps may not support, or support the new standard using 
> UTF-8 that the other apps may not support.  :-)

Thanks for the understandable explanation.

It just so happens that the old (amarok 1.3 = id3v1 tag recoding) way of 
dealing with it worked fine for me, while the current (amarok 1.4.4 = 
id3v2.4) way does not work for either amarok or xmms. 

Hans