I asked on Canola forum, but I ask here as well: Can someone see non-English Unicode ID3 tags correctly? Mine are completely broken and Medial Player shows them like that: "<>45;L 4;O A1>@:8". I can see the tags correctly in Windows Explorer and in tag editor, and they are in UTF16 indeed.

So the issue is that upper byte of every unicode character cut when it is converted to 8-bit string. Character 044e will be displayed as 4e character. I would guess, the bug is somewhere in id3lib. If anyone is interesting.