ID3 tag character encoding - how to change it?

I am sorry, but this is hard-coded, actually even with UTF-8 the player should show something.

You might have a look at the vendor's website, it's possible that there is a new software version for the player which supports UTF, if not there is nothing to do about this (at least I can't think of anything).

I've got a similar problem with a Sony Ericsson W850i -- it cuts short tags edited by amarok, possibly because the id3 tags are utf-8 encoded. Somebody wrote a python script to convert the tags, haven't tried it yet: http://blog.floatinginspace.za.org/technical/2007/06/26/w850i-utf-8-and-id3v24-bug/

It would be great if one were able to choose the encoding..

Your link doesn't work, but I think this is the same thing here:

http://www.floatinginspace.za.org/w850_cp/cp2w850.html

I haven't had the chance to test it out to see if it solves my problem though.

The link is not to the script itself, but a blog article.

I couldn't get that script to work myself. But I found a pretty convenient solution: there's an application called EasyTag that allows you to choose the encoding of the id3 tags in the preferences. I haven't run any detailed trials, but id3v2.3 with ISO-8859-1 works fine with my w850i. I just selected all my collection without changing any actual tags, and hit save. That seems to have replaced all the tags with those that my smartphone can read.

It would really be nice to be able to do this in amarok as well. Seems like a whole lot of devices haven't made the move to id3v2.4 or UTF-8 compatibility yet (even tho i hear the standard is more than 8 years old).