Basically when I try using UTF-8 on my mp3 files, the year tags won't show in the app which I need for sorting my albums by year, but they show on flac files. Can't use UTF-16 since it messes up some tags making them jumbled symbols, wondering where to go from here because I've tried setting them to different ID3 versions and it's still either UTF-16 to see the year and messed up tags or UTF-8 to fix the messed up tags but no year, unless there's something I'm missing or I just need to switch to another music player entirely.
Exactly.
Just take care that you do not have mixed tag versions in the files like APE and ID3.