On the 30th of January Freedb has announced support for the Unicode (UTF-8) character set. This improves the multi-lingual functionality of the service significantly. Applications utilizing need to be updated in order to add the UTF-8 functionality.
Finally it's done! freedb supports Unicode (UTF-8) characters while at the same time staying backwards compatible with old applications! This opens freedb for CDs from large parts of the world, which could not be submitted properly before, since the charset was limited to Latin1.Source: Freedb.org
In order to take advantage of the Unicode support, applications need to be updated to support the new protocol level 6. Developers are encouraged to implement Unicode-support in their applications and can find the required documentation in the developers section.
Another important improvement of our new server software is that fact, that submitters now always get an e-mail response if their submission was not included in the database. Previously that was not the case for some sorts of problems.
Big thanks go out to Edmund Grimley Evans, who laid the foundation of the UTF-8 support in freedb, and to Jon F. Zahornacky, who stayed the course in difficult times. Without them, the new server software release would not exist!
