Thanks for the info. I did try "binmode STDOUT, ':utf8';" at the top of my script but it made no difference. I didn't think a simple "o" with an umlaut was unicode anyway. Isn't it a simple ASCII character? Maybe I shouldn't even be specifying utf8 the way I am?

Anyway, I'm obviously missing something or I'm on the wrong track because with MP3::Tag, printing stuff with such characters results in black diamonds where as printing the same information, from the same MP3 file, retrieved using MP3::Info does not.