many of these use Mutli-byte characters for the titles of the songs, artists, albums, etc.

Oh, while we're on, if you're actually in East Asia, could you possibly go round to the houses of anyone who writes tagging software that puts JIS or other non-global encodings in ID3v2 headers but sets the header bits meaning tags are ISO8859-1, and hit them with big wet fish? Ta.

ID3v2 allows for UTF-16 and UTF-8 for a good reason, and it's so the same tag means the same thing to everyone in the world, without having to know the locale of the PC it was written on (which you can't know). It's not rocket science, CJKV tag editing software folks, and it's in your own advantage too, as it means you stand a fighting chance of seeing accented characters, Cyrillic etc. if you ever get your hands on MP3s from France, Russia, Greece, Eastern Europe or any other not-just-ASCII part of the world.

[/rant], sorry

Peter