When I tried to play an mp3 that had an umlaut in its tag bmp immediately began using 100% cpu, didn't play anything and was almost impossible to kill (I had to ssh in from another machine!) A different file that contained an ë (can't input this on my keyboard...) in the title tag was played back but the title was not displayed. beep-media-player-0.9.7-r6 works fine. I've downgraded for now. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3.
Could you try to comment out epatch ${FILESDIR}/${PV}-unicode.patch in the -r7 ebuild and then remerge? I have my doubts about the reliability of this one. If it helps I'll pull -r7 from the portage tree as there's just one other patch in there which is not that critical (ipv6 support for streams).
without the unicode patch -r7 works
Broken -r7 release pulled. Sorry for the inconvenience.