Generic API useless with Unicode for ID3v2?

[Linus Walleij]

2007/10/17, Vitali Lovich <vlovich at gmail.com>:

> The better question is why UTF-8 isn't used as the default encoding
> everywhere.

IIRC the main reason for not using UTF-8 is that there are many old
programs out there which cannot handle it, since it was introduced with
ID3v2 2.4 and taglib is actually one of the few libs which can handle
it correctly.

The interoperability and likeness to ASCII doesn't help ID3v2, each
frame is tagged with an encoding and when that has the unknown
enumeration value for UTF-8 (0x03) old implementations done
prior to 2.4 will just bail out and set the string to <null>.

Linus