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Thread: Multiple Artists

  1. #1

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    Multiple Artists

    If i rip a cd with dbpowermap which includes multiple artists on a track the tag will be split with \\ as a seperate artist.
    Perfecttunes recommends always to split with ";" and not \\.In this case there ist only one artist.

    Both are working with Assetupnp ans Musicbee.

    What is the best solution and why is it not the same in these applications ?

  2. #2
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    Re: Multiple Artists

    Multiple artists are stored in separate binary fields. "; " and "\\" are two different ways how different programs represent a delimiter in the GUI. dBpoweramp and PerfectTunes use the delimiter ";".

    Dat Ei

  3. #3
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    Re: Multiple Artists

    Quote Originally Posted by Dat Ei View Post
    Multiple artists are stored in separate binary fields. "; " and "" are two different ways how different programs represent a delimiter in the GUI. dBpoweramp and PerfectTunes use the delimiter ";".

    Dat Ei
    Yes, for example, if I use ";" as the delimiter in dbpoweramp when ripping, if I open these files in mp3tag, the delimiter shows as '\\' (two back slashes). But it all works as expected. Both of these delimiters are somewhat artificial for the software in use. In either case, at least for FLAC files with two artists, two different fields get written, with each field containing one of the two artists.
    Last edited by garym; 02-05-2022 at 02:58 PM.

  4. #4

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    Re: Multiple Artists

    I only got the free version of perfecttunes which shows the ";".
    Just to get it right.If a got the full version of perfecttunes and let the programm do the split (Which ist displayed ";") it would be like two different artist in the tag in mp3tag ?
    In this case its just a visual thing.

    Example:

    Artist: Missy Elliott feat. LilKim

    Perfecttunes will suggest the change to Missy Elliott; LilKim.I have done this change with mp3 tag.In this case it will be one artist inside the id tag of the flac file.
    But it will work perfectly fine with Musicbee and Assetupnp because the software knows the ";" is a delimiter.

    If I understand you correctly, perfecttunes will not just insert ";" as a separator in the artist tag but instead put a second artist in the tag like dbpoweramp ?

  5. #5
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    Re: Multiple Artists

    All the different tag formats have different ways of handling multiple artists.

    ID3v2.3 (Used mainly in MP3) stores everything in a single field and uses "/" to signify that these are actually different artists, hence the problem with storing AC/DC (for which some programs have attempted a work-around)
    ID3v2.4 (Used mainly in MP3) also stores everything in a single field but uses a "NUL" character to signify that these are actually different artists (addressing the problem with "/")
    Vorbis (used in FLAC and others) actually stores each value in its own field e.g. ARTIST:Missy Elliott | ARTIST: LilKim | ...
    and so on...

    To simplify tagging (so the user doesn't need to know how each format works) and the user interface (with FLAC you'd have to show as many input boxes as there were artists), each application hides this complexity and instead presents all the values in a single field delimited by 'something'; that something could be anything, but you obviously wouldn't want it to be a character that was likely to be in a normal field so each application has come up with its own standard, although ';' seems to be most popular with Mp3tag being the main exception in its use of \\.


    Quote Originally Posted by Caipion View Post
    Example:

    Artist: Missy Elliott feat. LilKim

    Perfecttunes will suggest the change to Missy Elliott; LilKim.I have done this change with mp3 tag.In this case it will be one artist inside the id tag of the flac file.
    But it will work perfectly fine with Musicbee and Assetupnp because the software knows the ";" is a delimiter.
    Technically, now you know that FLAC actually stores each artist in it's own field, PerfectTunes will actually create two ARTIST tags in the FLAC file with one artist in each. If on the other hand you were writing to ID3v2.3 the Artist field would contain 'Missy Elliott/LilKim' and if it were ID3v2.4 it would be 'Missy Elliott[NUL]LilKim'.

    DBPowerAMP & PerfectTunes handle multiple artists correctly (to the specification), so as long as whatever other program you use those files in, also obeys the spec they will present them correctly (which AssetUPnP/Mp3Tag and I assume MusicBee does).

    Hope that helps.

    EDIT: What I've described is as per the specification to keep it simple, unfortunately not every program adheres to the spec (Mp3Tag uses NUL when writing ID3v2.3 tags) which makes using one application to do the tagging and another for presentation (e.g. for UPnP) sometimes, "difficult" - although you should be fine with FLAC.
    Last edited by simbun; 02-06-2022 at 07:22 AM.

  6. #6
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    Re: Multiple Artists

    Quote Originally Posted by Caipion View Post
    If I understand you correctly, perfecttunes will not just insert ";" as a separator in the artist tag but instead put a second artist in the tag like dbpoweramp ?
    correct. the ";" is just the code to tell PerfectTunes or dbpoweramp to create separate tag fields for multivalue capable fields (such as ARTIST). You can see this when you look at at file's tags (at least FLAC). You'll see the multiple artists listed separately as multiple ARTIST fields.

  7. #7

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    Re: Multiple Artists

    Perfect

    Thank you all for your support

  8. #8

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    Re: Multiple Artists

    When ripping to ALAC I have used 'artist 1 ; artist 2' to seperate multiple artists. When I load the ALAC tracks into iTunes, the second artist is completely ignored. iTunes only displays the first artist. So I am having to go back and change all of the tracks back to 'Artist 1 Feat. Artist 2'.

    Does anyone know of a program similar to iTunes that supports multiple artists correctly?

  9. #9
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    Re: Multiple Artists


  10. #10
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    Re: Multiple Artists

    Quote Originally Posted by miggs View Post
    When ripping to ALAC I have used 'artist 1 ; artist 2' to seperate multiple artists. When I load the ALAC tracks into iTunes, the second artist is completely ignored. iTunes only displays the first artist. So I am having to go back and change all of the tracks back to 'Artist 1 Feat. Artist 2'.

    Does anyone know of a program similar to iTunes that supports multiple artists correctly?
    If the artists are not truly separated into two separate fields, then iTunes should display it as "Artist 1; Artist 2". But iTunes cannot show multiple fields, so if these have actually been split, then you are correct, only "Artist 1" will be displayed. However the tags still exist, just the second (or more) are ignored by iTunes.

    On Windows, Foober and MusicBee will show and use the extra tag values in fields like Artist, AlbumArtist, Composer, and Genre.
    For Android you can use GoneMAD or Poweramp as they both have support for the same multi-value fields, but not in Foobar mobile.
    Not sure if there any for MacOS.
    On IOS, good luck.

  11. #11

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    Re: Multiple Artists

    I use a combination of 3, TagScanner, Mp3tag, PerfectTUNES.
    Each is not perfect for every task, but all 3 have their own uses. TagScanner is very good at integration with online sites,(Discogs etc) and can embed images into the file and has a wide variety of metadata fields.

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