diff --git a/NEWS b/NEWS
index 066168edb..19788abc5 100644
--- a/NEWS
+++ b/NEWS
@@ -35,6 +35,8 @@
   Windows users can now just type "beet" at the prompt to run beets.
 * Fixed an occasional bug where Mutagen would complain that a tag was
   already present.
+* Fixed some errors with filenames that have badly encoded special
+  characters.
 
 1.0b3
 -----
diff --git a/beets/autotag/__init__.py b/beets/autotag/__init__.py
index 0668fb1be..0cc21fc27 100644
--- a/beets/autotag/__init__.py
+++ b/beets/autotag/__init__.py
@@ -87,7 +87,16 @@ def _sorted_walk(path):
     dirs = []
     files = []
     for base in os.listdir(path):
-        base = library._unicode_path(base)
+        # While os.listdir() will try to give us unicode output (as
+        # we gave it unicode input), it may fail to decode some
+        # filenames.
+        try:
+            base = library._unicode_path(base)
+        except UnicodeError:
+            # Log and ignore undecodeable filenames.
+            log.error(u'invalid filename in %s' % path)
+            continue
+
         cur = os.path.join(path, base)
         if os.path.isdir(cur):
             dirs.append(base)
@@ -101,7 +110,6 @@ def _sorted_walk(path):
 
     # Recurse into directories.
     for base in dirs:
-        base = library._unicode_path(base)
         cur = os.path.join(path, base)
         # yield from _sorted_walk(cur)
         for res in _sorted_walk(cur):
diff --git a/beets/library.py b/beets/library.py
index fdc18bea8..a0040cbdc 100644
--- a/beets/library.py
+++ b/beets/library.py
@@ -164,7 +164,19 @@ def _unicode_path(path):
     """Ensures that a path string is in Unicode."""
     if isinstance(path, unicode):
         return path
-    return path.decode(sys.getfilesystemencoding())
+    encoding = sys.getfilesystemencoding() or sys.getdefaultencoding()
+    try:
+        out = path.decode(encoding)
+    except UnicodeError:
+        # This is of course extremely hacky, but I've received several
+        # reports of filesystems misrepresenting their encoding as
+        # UTF-8 and actually providing Latin-1 strings. This helps
+        # handle those cases. All this is the cost of dealing
+        # exclusively with Unicode pathnames internally (which
+        # simplifies their construction from metadata and storage in
+        # SQLite).
+        out = path.decode('latin1')
+    return out
 
 # Note: POSIX actually supports \ and : -- I just think they're
 # a pain. And ? has caused problems for some.