Thanks much for the reply ... I picked up the lib in question (mp3info) 
from RAA and and am somewhat unfamiliar with the code but your point 
makes perfect sense, now that you mention it :-)

I'll change "UNICODE" to "UTF-8" and see where that gets me ... if it 
works I'll contact the original author with a patch that also will 
include some small fixes I've added along the way.

Thanks much!
Tim

Dave Burt wrote:
> Tim Ferrell wrote:
> 
>>      data = Iconv.iconv("ISO-8859-1", "UNICODE", data)[0]
>>
>>#<Errno::ENOENT: No such file or directory - iconv("ISO-8859-1", 
>>"UNICODE")>
>>
>>I am totally lost on this ... any ideas?
> 
> 
> Your iconv install is working fine. Did you use my installer?
> 
> The library (which is written in C, so that's its excuse) throws the C error 
> ENOENT, which is a generic error meaning "file not found," when you feed it 
> an encoding name it doesn't know about. "Unicode" is one of those encoding 
> names.
> 
> I'm not sure exactly what you're after here, but (from 
> http://www.unicode.org/glossary) "There are seven character encoding schemes 
> in Unicode: UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-16BE, UTF-16LE, UTF-32, UTF-32BE, and 
> UTF-32LE." There are also UCS-2 (and UCS-2BE and UCS-2LE, relatively common) 
> and UCS-4, which are all different encoding schemas.
> 
> You probably want "UTF-8". It's popular.
> 
> 
>>Also is there any kind of alternative to iconv on Windows?
> 
> 
> I'm not aware of anything better supported in Ruby. There is another lib 
> that I've forgotten the name of. So I would say, "no." No.
> 
> Cheers,
> Dave 
> 
> 
>