Multiple artists separator in FLAC, dBpoweramp R13.2...

[jhvl]

Hi

I am currently using dBpoweramp (R13.2 - registered) to rip my CD collection to FLAC. I am a bit curious as to the separeator character when having several artists in e.g. the tag ARTIST or ALBUMARTIST.

when I rip a CD directly to FLAC and type "Artist1; Artist2", I can in a hex editor see that the resulting tag value is "Artist1<CR>Artist2", where <CR> is the good old Carriage Return, hex 0D.

- Is this standard FLAC spec?
- Or have I by a mistake set up the dBpoweramp some wrong way?

(I now know that I can add a DSP action that concatenates this multipe artist field to something else, like being separated by ';'. And Luckily the MP3tag.de editor can use regular expressions to change this to another sign. So my already ripped CD's can be changed. As you all guess most tag editors does not support entering control characters, as hex 0D, in normal text fields.)

[Spoon]

Re: Multiple artists separator in FLAC, dBpoweramp R13.2...

Make sure you are on the latest FLAC codec, the standard is:

ARTIST=artist1
ARTIST=artist2

which dbpoweramp follows.

[jhvl]

Re: Multiple artists separator in FLAC, dBpoweramp R13.2...

Hi Spoon

Thanks for your quick response.

I checked, I have the latest FLAC R13.1 (FLAC 1.2.1) codec.

Also I double checked the problem. It seems that multiple ARTISTS are cupported just like yuo write. No problems there.

What I wrote about is ALBUMARTIST - sorry I didn't make it 100% clear. When I try to have several album artists in the ALBUMARTIST field, and write them as "AAR1; AAR2", it ends up like one field, where the album artists are separated by hex 0D.

So maybe I am trying to do something that is not possible...?

[Spoon]

Re: Multiple artists separator in FLAC, dBpoweramp R13.2...

Correct, there is no standard in FLAC for multiple ALBUM ARTISTs, but it is not good we write with the CR, it should be written as '; '

[jhvl]

Re: Multiple artists separator in FLAC, dBpoweramp R13.2...

Hey

Cool! Thanks for your help.

Note: For others with the same "problem": you can make a permanent DSP/Action->ID Tag Processing->Manipulation->Multiple Artists to 'Artist1;Artist2', this transforms the CR to ; on the fly.

[DazBYorks]

Re: Multiple artists separator in FLAC, dBpoweramp R13.2...

Hi,

For consistencies sake I would expect nothing but multiple tags;

ALBUMARTIST=artist1
ALBUMARTIST=artist2

Daz

[jhvl]

Re: Multiple artists separator in FLAC, dBpoweramp R13.2...

Hi

You might be right. Looking at the FLAC format (http://flac.sourceforge.net/format.html) it links to the Vorbis format (http://xiph.org/vorbis/doc/v-comment.html), and this latter states:

--snip start---
Field names are not required to be unique (occur once) within a comment header. As an example, assume a track was recorded by three well know artists; the following is permissible, and encouraged:

ARTIST=Dizzy Gillespie
ARTIST=Sonny Rollins
ARTIST=Sonny Stitt
--snip end---

So it might be logical that all fields that contain ';' should be spilt into multiple fields with identical names.

However, it also serves to be pragmatic, and see how most players interpret multiple fields...!?

Anyway - for now I am happy...

Hi,

For consistencies sake I would expect nothing but multiple tags;

ALBUMARTIST=artist1
ALBUMARTIST=artist2

Daz

[Spoon]

Re: Multiple artists separator in FLAC, dBpoweramp R13.2...

Not always, comments can have ; and should not be splitted.

I had a look at the code today, it was a bug - internally it was looking for 'album artist' when now we use 'albumartist' so it should never write CR (the next dMC beta fixes)