Now I have a solution, without using string handler: TabLib::String str; TagLib::FileRef f(file); if(!f.isNull() && f.tag()){ TagLib::Tag *tag = f.tag(); str=tag->title(); if(str.isLatin1()){ //the line below is python //str=str.encode('iso-8859-1').decode('legacy encoding'); //actually I use another library to do this } } Regards, Buganini