Suppose you have a bunch of MP3 files whose ID3 tags are written in a non-Latin script (e.g. Russian) and you want them to show up properly in all your Unicode-supporting media players and apps.
Also suppose you're on Windows.
Here's a useful recipe assuming you have Java installed:
Download id3iconv and then open a command prompt, change to the directory containing the music and perform the following command (modify it to suit your needs!):
for /r %F in (*.mp3) do java -jar ..\path\to\id3iconv-0.2.1.jar -e cp1251 %~sF
In the following sample:
/r
is used to make it go into subdirectories (in case you have, say, a discography spanning many directories).%~sF
(short names) since the file names might not be represented in your ANSI encoding. Short names are the "safest".cp1251
is the encoding for Windows Cyrillic (suitable for Russian). Use the encoding that matches your files. id3iconv can't guess that :(