I'm banging my head against the wall here... I know vorbis tags are UTF-8, so I can store non-english characters if I'd like... How do I get oggenc to accept them? I can give it to them in whatever format it likes, I just can't figure out what it wants - if I give it in the local charset or whatever, it converts anything that isn't 7-bit clean to # signs. If I give it UTF-8, it does the same. I have managed to get vorbiscomment to (reluctantly) accept UTF-8 tags, but I'd rather not have to retag all my files as a separate step.

Any clues, or is oggenc simply incapable of living up to the vorbis standard? (And I swear I figured this out once before...)

Solved it (I think). The LANG enviornment variable needs to be appropriately twaddled to something like LANG=en_US or LANG=en_US.UTF-8 (if you want to specify tags in UTF-8).

(solution posted in case somebody with the same problem searches and finds this thread).