Lifted from Debian: https://sources.debian.org/patches/libid3tag/0.15.1b-14/11_unknown_encoding.dpatch/ In case of an unknown/invalid encoding, id3_parse_string() will return NULL, but the return value wasn't checked resulting in segfault in id3_ucs4_length(). This is the only place the return value wasn't checked. --- libid3tag-0.15.1b/compat.gperf 2004-01-23 09:41:32.000000000 +0000 +++ libid3tag-0.15.1b/compat.gperf 2007-01-14 14:36:53.000000000 +0000 @@ -236,6 +236,10 @@ encoding = id3_parse_uint(&data, 1); string = id3_parse_string(&data, end - data, encoding, 0); + if (!string) + { + continue; + } if (id3_ucs4_length(string) < 4) { free(string); --- libid3tag-0.15.1b/parse.c 2004-01-23 09:41:32.000000000 +0000 +++ libid3tag-0.15.1b/parse.c 2007-01-14 14:37:34.000000000 +0000 @@ -165,6 +165,9 @@ case ID3_FIELD_TEXTENCODING_UTF_8: ucs4 = id3_utf8_deserialize(ptr, length); break; + default: + /* FIXME: Unknown encoding! Print warning? */ + return NULL; } if (ucs4 && !full) {