Rich's Tongfamily (Richtong.net add-on)

_My Dad had a bunch of CDs from Taiwan he wanted to rip to his iPod. What a mess figuring out how to do this. Essentially, we are back in the days of code pages. The CDs don’t store unicode (unicode was invented after CDs), so you have to know how to set the code pages to Taiwan. Also only Exact Audio Copy and dbPowerAmp and iTunes appear to support this. Musicmatch doesn’t like things with different languages. Here’s how to set it
Windows XP Internationalization Tips
# “Language for non-Unicode applications” is the key phrase, and the dialog goes on to say:
This system setting enables non-Unicode programs to display menus
and dialogs in their native language. It does not affect Unicode
programs, but it does apply to all users of this computer.
Select a language to match the language version of the non-Unicode
programs you want to use:
This is a very important concept, and it will save a lot of grief when you want to look at legacy applications (or brain-damaged applications) that do not handle Unicode.
How it works
In general, it is not possible to know which programs support Unicode and which do not. Therefore, if you are working in Korean:
# some of your programs will show Korean just fine (e.g. Microsoft Office, Notepad).
# other programs will show either question marks or garbage, whenever a Korean character is displayed.
The solution is to set the “System default code page” to Korean, which is the Windows 2000 terminology that describes this dialog box. In Windows XP you set the “Language for non-Unicode programs” to Korean, as shown above, and then Korean will show up correctly in all applications (assuming you have installed Asian support).
This setting is required for Arabic, Hebrew, Asian languages, Russian, and any language whose alphabet is different from Western European