Question about my artist tags

[thefirstofthe300 291]

 It seems that artists are no longer working with semicolons.  The first artist is recognized but all artists afterward aren't credited.

 

[Luke 36999]

for the artists tag, we've always just used '/'. It's nothing new. You can search for the old threads to find why the music aficionados around here recommended it

[thefirstofthe300 291]

Hmmm.  I just thought I had read that the separators where both "/" and ";".  Good to know.  I will make the change accordingly.

[thefirstofthe300 291]

SOOOoooo......I ran into a bit of a wrinkle.

 

I have some FLAC files that I DON'T want to convert to mp3 files.  These flac files are properly tagged with vorbis comments and no id3 tags as per the FLAC standards.

 

According to id3v2 on my Ubuntu 15.04 box, there is no id3 tag.  However, there are Vorbis comments.  ffmpeg sees the Vorbis comments but combines the multiple values using semicolons.  Consequently, none of the multiple artist FLAC files are attributed to their respective artists.  Any solutions here?

Edited October 5, 2015 by thefirstofthe300

[thefirstofthe300 291]

Any thoughts on this Luke?

[Luke 36999]

i guess if @@ginjaninja thinks it's ok.

[ginjaninja 533]

@@thefirstofthe300

@@Luke

 

not sure what i am being asked for feedback on, but its nice to be included :-)

 

things i am aware of

1. ffprobe (what emby uses to extract tags) always did (and i think still does) have issues with outputting some types of multiple tags (depending on how tags were written by the client)..in particular how mp3tag writes multiple tags in its native preferred format (i suspect this applies to flac/vorbis tags)...related post

 

2. i was under the impression that emby treated various strings as separators of ffprobes output, from the simple ';' to the more complex ' with ' and ' feat. ' (<-unconfirmed/untested recently).

 

3. 'artist' and 'artists' tags are (treated) differently. i was under the impression that Emby was starting to make more use of the 'albumartists' tag and 'artists' tag (as opposed to just 'albumartist' and 'artist' tags).

My hope* and i believe the hope of the person that submitted a feature request in regards of 'albumartists' and 'artists' was that these fields would be treated as helper fields to necessarily and 100% correctly separate (eg,) the 'artist' field into its constituent artists even though the 'artist' field might contain lots of spurious/fluffy non artist information...example

'artist' field ='ArtistA & ArtistB featuring ArtistC's spirit'

'artists' field='ArtistA;ArtistB;ArtistC'

 

*however  I have never seen the development teams design intention for 'artists' tag formalized and how it might inform the UI/inform the artist tag or overide the artist tag in the UI as well as complement proper indexing and searching. ive just seen the feature request.

 

reason is that the musicbrainz tool Picard, writes 'fluffly information' into the 'artist' field (as do most other music apps with a multitude of separators), but very definite/pure information into the 'artists' field.

 

note there is currently an acknowledged issue that 'artists' tags are not separated in Emby (at least for ';')..

note For Picard, writing out of albumartists and artists tag requires an amendment in the options/advanced scripting; theres a post on the musicbrainz forums..or i can post a screenshot of mine.

 

4. if you search musicbrainz database, ';' and '\' is the least used and 'safest' separator to use from an 'Emby only perspective'. (there are only 2 very obscure artists, much more with ',' and '/').

However the users may use other clients with other separator expectations.

This is the beauty of (3)...the 'artist' tag can be as untidy, fluffy, non specific, and 'other app compatible' as you like....the artists tag (separated by ';') will 100%** correctly separate in every instance apart from 2 obscure artists in the whole of the musicbrainz database. better yet the fluffy context of a fluffy artist tag can be present in all its beauty but the specific artists still extracted (as in the example).

 

**Not withstanding the background ffprobe issue (1) of extracting the multivalue tag in all instances....although even here (3) would or at least could help, as the way Picard writes 'artists' tag is 100% ffprobe compatible.

Edited October 7, 2015 by ginjaninja

[thefirstofthe300 291]

So ginjaninja, the problem files I am having trouble with are flac files.  According to MB, the flac tagging standard is to use Vorbis comments and the Vorbis comment tagging standard uses a tag multiple times when there are multiple values; hence, the two artists tags in the above flac file.

 

The one thing that would fix my problem is simply adding the semicolon to the list of separators that Emby uses.  As ginjaninja states, according to MusicBrainz, the semicolon is one of the rarest symbols to find in an artist name so I would think adding it to Emby's separators should be trivial and cause minimal issues for all users.

[ginjaninja 533]

FWIW

I cant see your image in your 1st post, so i might be missing some of your meaning...

Emby already uses ';' separator on the artist & albumartist tag (its the separator i use).

I believe Emby intends users to use 'artist' and 'albumartist' tags, 'artists' and 'albumartists' are still developing i think?

For my (multivalue) tags I use a simple string with ';' separator and have no problems (in my FLAC and mp3 files)..

 

I have just retested the latest version of ffprobe, and reread my post; ffprobe supports both types of flac tags (in so far as mp3tag clients writes them at least) but not both types of mp3. (emby relies on ffprobe)

 

so i am struggling to see the problem..

 

separate to your issue....ffprobe dont work for tag type 2 on mp3s , fortunately picard uses tag type 1, so if emby did fully utilise artists and albumartists, emby would (for anal picard users) 100% detect all separated artists all the time.

 

 

 

Flacs Work

 

 

Edited October 8, 2015 by ginjaninja

[thefirstofthe300 291]

Hmmm...I had all of my music tagged with ";" as the separator and none of the multi-artist files were parsed correctly.  To explain my tags, I have been tagging them using Picard so all of my artist tags use something like Artist1 feat. Artist2 and include an artists tag with the value Artist1;Artist2.  I have no idea why yours would work and mine didn't.

 

At Luke's suggestion, I retagged all of the Artists tags to Artist1/Artist2 and the problem disappeared for all of my mp3 files.  It seems that due to the fact that ffprobe generates an artists tag for flac files with a ';' as the separator that I am running into the same issue I had with mp3 files.

[ginjaninja 533]

Hmmm...I had all of my music tagged with ";" as the separator and none of the multi-artist files were parsed correctly. To explain my tags, I have been tagging them using Picard so all of my artist tags use something like Artist1 feat. Artist2 and include an artists tag with the value Artist1;Artist2. I have no idea why yours would work and mine didn't.

 

At Luke's suggestion, I retagged all of the Artists tags to Artist1/Artist2 and the problem disappeared for all of my mp3 files. It seems that due to the fact that ffprobe generates an artists tag for flac files with a ';' as the separator that I am running into the same issue I had with mp3 files.

You are falling foul of the issue linked in my point 3..when artists tag is present emby has a problem..luke has said he will fix this..for the moment you may have to avoid use of artists tags.

 

Sent from my GT-I9505 using Tapatalk

[thefirstofthe300 291]

You are falling foul of the issue linked in my point 3..when artists tag is present emby has a problem..luke has said he will fix this..for the moment you may have to avoid use of artists tags.

 

Sent from my GT-I9505 using Tapatalk

 

Oh.  I guess I missed that.  I can't really avoid using artists tags for my flac files since they actually are generated by ffprobe.  I will wait patiently for the patch.