(Album) Artist separators

[MarkSealey]

Is there a setting in dBpoweramp (2025-02-07 (2) om macOS 15.3.1) to change the "Artist(s)" and Album Artist(s)" fields separator from a comma (",") to three semi-colons (";;;") as is best practice for Roon, please?

That is from, say:

Graham Johnson,Janet Baker

to

Graham Johnson;;;Janet Baker

etc?

[Spoon]

Which audio format?

[garym]

Hmmm, my Roon standard setup handles normal artist or album artist separation as created with standard dbpoweramp tag writing on FLAC files. I've never seen the ";;;" needed in Roon. In fact, for FLAC files, all these separators (; or , or even \\ in mp3tag) are just indicators for the program writing the tag fields to create MULTIPLE fields. For example, if one has two artists (Willie Nelson; Wynton Marsalis) the resulting FLAC file has TWO different Artist fields in the metadata tags:

ARTIST: Willie Nelson
ARTIST: Wynton Marsalis

This would be true from dbpa creating the tags or from mp3tag creating the tags with format: (Willie Nelson\\Wynton Marsalis).

[MarkSealey]

Spoon - FLAC
garym - thanks, Yes I have also never had a problem. But I want to make sure that I may not be storing up trouble ahead if Roon ever makes it obligatory to separate by three semi-colons.
It seems to cope now. But if there's a way to export from dBpoweramp into Yate with everything future-proofed I'd like to do that now!

[garym]

Spoon - FLAC
garym - thanks, Yes I have also never had a problem. But I want to make sure that I may not be storing up trouble ahead if Roon ever makes it obligatory to separate by three semi-colons.
It seems to cope now. But if there's a way to export from dBpoweramp into Yate with everything future-proofed I'd like to do that now!

Why would roon want to do that. It would be very odd as no tagging program I'm aware of uses ";;;" as field separator. I've used Roon for maybe 6 years and never seen an issue that required ";;;"

[Spoon]

You want to follow the tagging rules as set by the audio format. FLAC uses vorbis comments :

https://www.xiph.org/vorbis/doc/v-comment.html

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

If roon deviates from the standard, it would be to the detriment of roon.

dBpoweramp writes multiple artists as above, it standardizes editing by presenting as Artist1; Artist2

[simbun]

I want to make sure that I may not be storing up trouble ahead if Roon ever makes it obligatory to separate by three semi-colons.

The Roon post you linked to states:

Finally, note that it is nearly always better to simply put separate values in separate tags. A file with two `ARTIST` tags instead of `Artist1; Artist2` will be more easily and unambiguously understood by virtually all software.

In other words follow the FLAC standard.

[MarkSealey]

You want to follow the tagging rules as set by the audio format. FLAC uses vorbis comments :

… snip …

This confuses me (I'm sorry) on two counts:

I use Yate to tag files after ripping in dBpoweramp.

When I load .flac files into Yate after ripping, there is only one Artists field.

Secondly, for classical music, the statement on the page you kindly draw my attention to:

ARTIST The artist generally considered responsible for the work. In popular music this is usually the performing band or singer. For classical music it would be the composer.

is definitely untrue. Most composers, I'd say, have been dead for decades and centuries and are unable to perform now and so be artists.

So I think I must be missing somethings…?

[MarkSealey]

Thanks, @simbun,

The Roon post you linked to states:
== snip ==

But my tagger, Yate, only has one Artist field. What am I missing?

[simbun]

But my tagger, Yate, only has one Artist field. What am I missing?

Each tagging standard has its own way to store multi-value tags. The tagging standard ID3v2.3 stores values in a single field separated by '/', whereas ID3v2.4 improves on that (try storing AC/DC in ID3v2.3) by using a NUL delimiter. Vorbis (used in FLAC) on the other hand stores each in their own field e.g.

TAG           VALUE
ARTIST        Mark Ronson
ARTIST        Lily Allen
ARTISTSORT    Ronson, Mark
ARTISTSORT    Allen, Lily

Rather than expect users to understand the intricacies of the format they're using, tagging applications adopt a special character to denote the separation e.g. Mp3tag uses '\\' whilst foobar and dBpoweramp use ';'.

I'm not a Mac user so have no experience with Yate, but assuming it's a capable tagging application it will be storing it using the FLAC (Vorbis) standard, even though the UI displays it as a single input field.

To check that Yate is following the FLAC standard, run the following code against a track that has multiple artists:

hexdump -C --length 1024 filename

NOTE: You may need to increase the length depending on the amount of tags in the file.

You should see something like:

000002f0 34 32 31 35 12 00 00 00 41 52 54 49 53 54 3d 4a |4215....ARTIST=J|
00000300 6f 6e 20 42 61 74 69 73 74 65 2d 00 00 00 41 52 |on Batiste-...AR|
00000310 54 49 53 54 3d 53 74 2e 20 41 75 67 75 73 74 69 |TIST=St. Augusti|
00000320 6e 65 20 48 69 67 68 20 53 63 68 6f 6f 6c 20 4d |ne High School M|
00000330 61 72 63 68 69 6e 67 20 31 30 30 15 00 00 00 41 |arching 100....A|
00000340 52 54 49 53 54 3d 44 61 76 69 64 20 47 61 75 74 |RTIST=David Gaut|
00000350 68 69 65 72 1b 00 00 00 41 52 54 49 53 54 3d 47 |hier....ARTIST=G|
00000360 6f 73 70 65 6c 20 53 6f 75 6c 20 43 68 69 6c 64 |ospel Soul Child|

As you can see each artist is being stored separately.

[Spoon]

Thanks, @simbun,

But my tagger, Yate, only has one Artist field. What am I missing?

It suggests that Yate cannot work with multiple artists in FLAC.

[vilsen]

The delimiter in Yate seems to be triple semicolon ;;;

So you should write

Graham Johnson; Janet Baker in dBpoweramp or
Graham Johnson;;;Janet Baker in Yate or
Graham Johnson\\Janet Baker in Mp3tag

which then should be correctly written into the FLAC metadata as

ARTIST=Graham Johnson
ARTIST=Janet Baker

For further explanation see link in the next post (waiting for approval).

[vilsen]

https://2manyrobots.com/forum/?mingleforumaction=viewtopic&t=173

[garym]

The delimiter in Yate seems to be triple semicolon ;;;

So you should write

Graham Johnson; Janet Baker in dBpoweramp or
Graham Johnson;;;Janet Baker in Yate or
Graham Johnson\\Janet Baker in Mp3tag

which then should be correctly written into the FLAC metadata as

ARTIST=Graham Johnson
ARTIST=Janet Baker

For further explanation see link in the next post (waiting for approval).

This is the answer! Different programs use different delimiters in a SINGLE artist field. But this is just for entering the information. These multiple entries are then parsed and placed in separate tag fields following the tag protocol for FLAC files.

[GBrown]

This is the first time I have seen any program use a triple semicolon ";;;" as a delimiter. The usual "standard" has been a single ";", and in mp3tag the double backslash "\" is used to indicate multiple fields of the same tag. Windows choice to use a single forward slash "/" breaks some common artist names such as the most common one AC/DC.

You might think that the use of ";;;" or even "\" would be highly unlikely and be good choices for this placeholder. But there is always an artist out there that comes
up with something that breaks even these.