Lyric encoding for LilyPond midis

[Mark Dewey]

I've been having trouble with my karaoke midis made from LilyPond, seeing as my 
midi player doesn't do UTF-8.

Generally speaking, the only UTF-8 characters I need are also included in the 
extended ASCII character set (which my karaoke player—or pretty much any 
karaoke player—should be fine with).

Is there a way to make it so the applicable characters are translated to that 
character set for the midi so I don't see garbled stuff every time I type 
characters such as the following? —, “, ”, í, ß, ð, Þ, and so forth.

Anyway, that would be nice to know.  I'd rather leave the text/source/ly file 
as UTF-8 if I could, though (but I'd still want to know, if not).

If not . . . Do you have any suggestions for a good UTF-8 compatible karaoke 
midi player (preferably one specifically meant for that, rather than something 
huge like Winamp)?