diff --git a/bumblebee-status b/bumblebee-status
index f28dc7c..41e8636 100755
--- a/bumblebee-status
+++ b/bumblebee-status
@@ -10,6 +10,28 @@ import bumblebee.output
 import bumblebee.input
 import bumblebee.modules.error
 
+# taken from
+# https://stackoverflow.com/a/42146082
+# seems an excellent solution to me
+class SmartStdout:
+    def __init__(self, encoding=None, org_stdout=None):
+        if org_stdout is None:
+            org_stdout = getattr(sys.stdout, 'org_stdout', sys.stdout)
+        self.org_stdout = org_stdout
+        self.encoding = encoding or getattr(org_stdout, 'encoding', None) or 'utf-8'
+
+    def write(self, s):
+        self.org_stdout.write(s.encode(self.encoding, 'backslashreplace'))
+
+    def __getattr__(self, name):
+        return getattr(self.org_stdout, name)
+
+def set_defaultencoding_globally(encoding='utf-8'):
+    assert sys.getdefaultencoding() in ('ascii', 'mbcs', encoding)
+    import imp
+    _sys_org = imp.load_dynamic('_sys_org', 'sys')
+    _sys_org.setdefaultencoding(encoding)
+
 def main():
     config = bumblebee.config.Config(sys.argv[1:])
 
@@ -63,6 +85,9 @@ def main():
             time.sleep(1)
 
 if __name__ == "__main__":
+    if sys.stdout.isatty():
+        sys.stdout = sys.stderr = SmartStdout()
+    set_defaultencoding_globally('utf-8')
     main()
 
 # vim: tabstop=8 expandtab shiftwidth=4 softtabstop=4
diff --git a/bumblebee/modules/cmus.py b/bumblebee/modules/cmus.py
index 62fbfaf..2db4c0c 100644
--- a/bumblebee/modules/cmus.py
+++ b/bumblebee/modules/cmus.py
@@ -1,5 +1,4 @@
 # pylint: disable=C0111,R0903
-# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
 
 """Displays information about the current song in cmus.
 
@@ -69,10 +68,6 @@ class Module(bumblebee.engine.Module):
         return returns.get(widget.name, self._status)
 
     def _eval_line(self, line):
-        # not a typo, use decode detection to see whether we are
-        # dealing with Python2 or Python3
-        if hasattr(line, "decode"):
-            line = line.encode("utf-8", "replace")
         name, key, value  = (line.split(" ", 2) + [None, None])[:3]
 
         if name == "status":