RusXMMS project is aimed to help users to handle MP3 files having ID3 tags in multiple encodings. At the moment project supports both reading and writing tags, encoding and language auto detection, and even translation between languages by means of libtranslate. Despite the "Rus" title it works with most european languages. There patch is available against current Gentoo xmms codeset. It is intensively tested for a year and confirmed to be stable. Would be nice to see the patch in the portage tree again. All required ebuilds are available from RusXMMS project page: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=65796&package_id=158448
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 86243 ***
The bug 86243 have been closed (and I haven't permissions to reopen it) by the following reasons: "Our xmms codebase is too far off from 1.2.10 to make this reasonable. xmms-mpg123 and xmms-vorbis have good locale support builtin including unicode, so make sure you're using xmms-mpg123 and not xmms-mad." However, 1. There is a patch against current Gentoo codest available. 2. Unicode doesn't solve problem: a) there is existing a lot of mp3's with tags using other encodings b) exachange with Windows users 3. xmms-mpg123 is unable to display correctly anything except Unicode if MP3's in several encodings are present. The patch allows to represent even multi-language playlists. 4. The patch propose some additional functionality, e.g. translation, transliteration.
Honestly, we are planning to remove xmms when the time comes, not to patch it for additional functionality. Sorry.