amaroK 1.3.9, system locale is utf-8.
I use the following command to strip the title tag, but it's malformed, so it's not utf-16
id3v2 -l xxx.mp3 | grep Title | grep Artist | iconv -f utf16 -t utf8 -c - | sed -e "s/^Title\s*: \(.*\)Artist\s*: \(.*\)$/\1/g"

I've also tried ucs2, also malformed. what's the encoding?

btw, why amaroK save tag into id3v1, and delete the id3v2 tag? I can't understand this...

I upgraded amarok to 1.4.0 today (with Debian testing), and found it still save id3 into id3v1. Is there any option to save id3 to id3v2?