text encoding description byte [...] If ISO-8859-1 is used this byte should be $00, if Unicode is used it should be $01.

A later (2.4?) version of the ID3v2 spec also allows $02 for "UTF-16 big endian without BOM" (why?) and $03 for UTF-8. But for best compatibility people should stick with $00 and $01. It's possible that your ripper is writing UTF-8 as per 2.4 spec and your other clients are ignoring it as per 2.3 spec -- but it sounds more likely that your ripper is just broken.

Peter