Banshee doesn't fully support Unicode ID3 tags when managing files

hmm, it seems banshee doesn't support them in the UI either?

the artist shows as Ko?n in the artist column and in the tag editor

adding further to the mystery, my last.fm --> personal sidebar entry is currently showing a KoЯn track with KoЯn correctly displayed in the artist column

... and editing the metadata of the original .mp3 and pasting KoЯn in seems to work, so perhaps it is a bug with importing of metadata rather than a lack of handling for the non-ascii content

Sorry I'm a bit late, but I think this was perhaps due to encoding of the metadata. UTF-8/Unicode information should display pretty universally but, in my experience, ID3 tags don't support it well and downloaded MP3s rarely use it anyhow. Seems like everything's fixed now anyway, but just for posterity. :)

Please be sure to report any other bugs you find with Banshee/Ubuntu!

Was investigating this as well, it appears that this is a valid bug as Banshee becomes incapable of properly handling media with fully non-ASCII artist names or album names.

An upstream bug report with patch is available at https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=520516

This bug was fixed in the package banshee - 1.5.5-1

---------------
banshee (1.5.5-1) unstable; urgency=low

  * New upstream release
    + New Features:
      - Gapless Playback / Playbin2 (LP: #45518, #377354)
      - Grid View
      - YouTube Extension
    + Enhancements:
      - Improve search responsiveness on large libraries (LP: #474514)
      - Add icons for Nexus One and Audiobooks (LP: #532182)
      - Play Queue item count, size, duration now ignores old tracks
      - Muinshee fixes: disable Auto-DJ, allow reordering, hide previous song
    + Notable bug fixes:
      - Fix a very common, SQL-related crash in 1.5.4 (Closes: #572136)
      - Fix saving equalizer settings in culture-invariant way
      - Jumping to a source's prefs via its context menu works again
      - Usage data not submitted more than every 48 hours
      - Fix repeatedly resyncing some files to a device b/c transcoded
      - Clear the redo stack on shuffle mode change
      - Accept feeds with empty title (LP: #468323)
      - Uri encode file location queries, making them work properly
  * debian/control:
    + Bump gst-plugins-base-dev version for gapless playback
    + Add libgdata-cil-dev for youtube extenesion
  * debian/rules:
    + Add --enable-gapless-playback and --enable-gdata

banshee (1.5.4-1) unstable; urgency=low

  * New upstream release (Closes: #571734)
    + New features:
      - Opt-In Usage Data Collection
      - Default Equalizer Presets
      - Extensible Shuffle Modes
    + Enhancements:
      - Wikipedia context pane extension enabled by default
      - Add support for Nokia N900 phones
      - Add tooltip to playback error column
      - On close Internet Archive item, return to Search
      - Notify user if trying to sync missing file to DAP
      - Popup explanation of manual playlist ordering when appropriate
      - Simplify the default set of columns in Podcasts
      - Enable 'Delete From Drive' action in File System Queue
      - Coverart for unicode artist/albums now supported
      - Dropped glade-sharp dep; GNOME 3.0 ready
      - Add columns showing track sample rate and bits per sample
      - Option to sort an artist's albums by year, not title
      - If starting Banshee hidden (--hide), up to half a second of
        startup time is saved
    + Notable bug fixes:
      - Enable LibraryWatcher only for Music and Video libraries
      - Do better job preserving IsCompilation metadata
      - Store some PlayQueue settings in the db (not GConf)
      - Update to Last.fm's API change for scrobbling/recs
      - Bring back static FileNamePattern API used by some scripts
      - Fix several memory leaks
    + Other bugs fixed:
      - Fix segfault with Cairo when playing a song without album art (LP: #523913)
      - Follow symlinks when scanning the library (LP: #406667)
      - Fix issue importing mp3s with non-ASCII ID3 tags (LP: #364562)
  * debian/control:
    + Bump libtaglib-cil-dev version requirement to 2.0.3.5
    + Drop libglade2.0-cil-dev and libgnome2.0-cil-dev build-dep
    + Add libwebkit-cil-dev to build-deps
  * debian/rules:
    + Reorder configure flags to match upstream's ./configure --help listing
    + Ad...