Representation of ALAC/AAC multi-artist Artist tag in right-click menu

[ac16161]

Running dBpoweramp 15.3 on Windows. I have ALAC/AAC files with multiple artists, which when I right-click on via the context menu to edit the ID-tag, will show the Artist tag to be "Artist 1; Artist 2" say. However, all other tag-aware programs (MP3Tag, Foobar, MinimServer) all display the tag as "Artist 1/Artist 2" and the multi-artist component is not recognised for database purposes (e.g. MinimServer will not file the track separately under all contributing artists in the All Artists view). However, if I use dBpoweramp to convert the files to FLAC, all other programs now see the Artist tag as "Artist 1; Artist 2" and correct multi-artist recognition then follows. So on the face of it, it seems I cannot currently rely on dBpoweramp's representation of the Artist tag for multi-artist ALAC/AAC files. Is there a configuration setting somewhere that can be changed?

Thanks.

[ac16161]

Re: Representation of ALAC/AAC multi-artist Artist tag in right-click menu

Running dBpoweramp 15.3 on Windows. I have ALAC/AAC files with multiple artists, which when I right-click on via the context menu to edit the ID-tag, will show the Artist tag to be "Artist 1; Artist 2" say. However, all other tag-aware programs (MP3Tag, Foobar, MinimServer) all display the tag as "Artist 1/Artist 2" and the multi-artist component is not recognised for database purposes (e.g. MinimServer will not file the track separately under all contributing artists in the All Artists view). However, if I use dBpoweramp to convert the files to FLAC, all other programs now see the Artist tag as "Artist 1; Artist 2" and correct multi-artist recognition then follows. So on the face of it, it seems I cannot currently rely on dBpoweramp's representation of the Artist tag for multi-artist ALAC/AAC files. Is there a configuration setting somewhere that can be changed?

Thanks.

An update on this: I opened an iTunes file in MP3Tag which showed the Artist as "Artist 1/Artist 2" and changed it to "Artist 1\\Artist 2" per the MP3Tag convention. All tag-aware applications I have (except dBpoweramp) immediately then recognised the multi-artist nature of the track, however now on right-clicking the file to open the dBpoweramp tag editor, Artist shows as "Artist 1" with Artist 2 having disappeared, even though all other applications I have recognise that there is a second contributing artist. It appears that dBpoweramp has an idiosyncratic approach to how it interprets the m4a artist tags compared to many other applications. Is there a reason for this, and is there a way to get around it?

[Spoon]

Re: Representation of ALAC/AAC multi-artist Artist tag in right-click menu

The correct standard for multi tagging alac is / as far as I am aware.

[ac16161]

Re: Representation of ALAC/AAC multi-artist Artist tag in right-click menu

The correct standard for multi tagging alac is / as far as I am aware.

I have several applications that do not treat '/' as a separator in m4a artist tags. It took some time to track tagging issues back to dBpoweramp, but now that I have my Logitech Media Server and MinimServer libraries are much cleaner. For now I will avoid dBpoweramp for m4a tag management as it seems to be inconsistent with the rest of my audio environment.

[Spoon]

Re: Representation of ALAC/AAC multi-artist Artist tag in right-click menu

Despite what others will tell you, there is no standard, because Apple control the m4a tag specification and Apple refuse to support mutli-anything in their programs.

So 5 years ago we took a look at all the programs and the most common usage of m4a multi artist back then (out side of Apple was '/'), it seems that in the mean time programs are switching to 2 separate tags:

artist1
artist2

That is why only the first is being shown, we can switch over to this, but would have to test against iTunes to see if it picks up the first or 2nd as the one it uses (you do not want featured artists shown as main).

[ac16161]

Re: Representation of ALAC/AAC multi-artist Artist tag in right-click menu

Indeed, having googled this it's not clear to me that there is a standard. It just so happens that my audio ecosystem in the main does not treat '/' as a separator in m4a artist tags. In any event, having used dBpoweramp for many years I continue to think that it's great and will continue to be a happy user. Now that I know how m4a files are handled, I can manage my server copy of my iTunes library accordingly. Most of my library is FLAC anyway so not a big deal now I know of the m4a feature.