I have reported the audacious-plugins' problem to upstream
http://bugs-meta.atheme.org/view.php?id=632 Here is the problem's description: In audacious-plugins' current implementation, when saving MP3's tags, unicode is enabled unconditionally. In save_cb() function in http://svn.atheme.org/audacious-plugins/trunk/src/mpg123/fileinfo.c, [ ^ ] there are two function calls: taglib_set_strings_unicode(1); and taglib_set_id3v2_default_text_encoding(); However, when reading MP3's tags, if chardet is enabled, unicode will be disabled. In fill_entries() function in the same file, there is a conditional compilation: #ifdef USE_CHARDET taglib_set_strings_unicode(FALSE); #endif This may not affect English only users. But for CJK users, this discrepancy of dealing with chardet will lead to MP3's title and artist being rendered as garbled characters.