According to this source: http://www.id3.org/id3v2.3.0, it seems most likely that your mp3 tag strings are iso-8859-1. To get them to appear properly in a text window, it depends on the nature of the text window.

Try this little experiment on the command line in the same window where you want to see the tag text displayed correctly: 

perl -le 'print "\xa1"'

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If you see an inverted exclamation mark, your terminal window works with iso-8859-1. If you get a question mark instead, try this next: 
perl -CS -le 'print "\xa1"'

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If you now see the inverted exclamation mark, you now know that your terminal wants utf8.

For an 8859-based display, perl should probably do nothing to the tag text before printing it. But I doubt this is the situation, because I don't think you would have been seeing "?" in your tag text if this were the case.

For a utf8-based display, it should sufficed to do  binmode STDOUT, ":utf8"; which will automatically (and quietly) "upgrade" the 8859-1 text to utf8 when printing to STDOUT.

If you are storing the tag text to a file, and are seeing question marks when looking at the file contents, it's the same basic issue. Use binmode on that file handle instead of STDOUT.

In reply to Re: MP3::Tag encoding problem by graff
in thread MP3::Tag encoding problem by mfearby

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