I encoded some files using EAC and FAAC 1.24 with the following command line:

It worked beautifully, and I was pleasently surprised to see the speed of the encoder. The only problem is that foobar2000 fails to read tags that contain special characters (°, German umlauts etc.). This might be a problem with foobar, but since tag support in FAAC is fairly new, I figured it's more probable that there's a bug in FAAC.
Has anybody else seen this?

does itunes support special characters? does it support cyrilic, arabic, chinese, etc...?

I've been through the same procedure, ripping with EAC and FAAC 1.24, including scandinavian characters in the tags.

The scandinavian character tags show up beautifully in Winamp 5, but are lost in foobar 0.81.

But, if I edit the tags in foobar (with Special FileInfo), the scandinavian characters are stored in the m4a-files and are shown perfectly in the foobar playlist.

So, in some way are international characters (unicode?) supported in the mp4-container FAAC -w creates and certainly in foobars special fileinfo.

iTunes, and the other decoders AFAIK, expect tags be encoded in Unicode, or UTF-8. Given there is no character conversion in FAAC, you would have to somehow make sure that it is passed the raw UTF-8 strings.

Foobar supports the tags created by Flac, Lame, Mppenc, and Oggenc. However, I have the same problem when encoding with Faac and playing back in Foobar.