How should rippers or other CDDB/freedb clients know what character encoding to use? It appears CDDB/freedb data can be either iso8859-1 or UTF-8 encoded, and there's nothing in the format to tell this.

All you can really do is check whether it's valid UTF-8 (fortunately, "accidentally valid" UTF-8 is reasonably rare) and, if not, assume it's local code page. If you're being really swish you can offer little menus for changing the interpretation -- otherwise you'll never see 8859-1 characters in JIS locales, or vice versa.

Peter