Tagger for music with full support for multiple artists

[thefirstofthe300 292]

I am looking for a tagger for my music that uses Musicbrainz, has full support for multiple artists and is able to separate them using semicolons.

 

In other words, does anybody know of a tagger that will work 100% with the MediaBrowser tagging scheme?

 

Preferably, it would be cross platform.

 

I would use Picard but I can't seem to figure out how to get it configured to separate multiple artists using semicolons in the artist tag vs the artists tag.

Edited January 12, 2015 by DaBungalow

[Beardyname 198]

I use beets and it seems to work great : http://beets.radbox.org/

[thefirstofthe300 292]

I use beets and it seems to work great : http://beets.radbox.org/

 

I have used beets also; it just doesn't have the ability to separate multiple artists with a semicolon yet. Picky, I know, but wanting to see if anyone has found a tagger with support for separating multiple artists.

[steve1977 67]

Interesting to see this request and I am also desperately looking for this.

 

With this respect, Picard is actually not the issue. Picard has one tag called "artist", which includes the name how the artist should be displayed (e.g., "Chakuza & RAF Camora feat. Joshi Mizu") and a separate tag called "artists", which includes the name for sorting purposes (e.g., "Chakuza; RAF Camora; Joshi Mizu").

So, this would need to be a feature request for MBS to support both "artist" and "artists" tag.

 

So far, there is only "albumartist" and no separate tag called "albumartists" in Picard. This will be implemented soon, so if this feature can be added to MBS, it would be nice to already cater for this functionality as well.

 

@@Luke @@ginjaninja Any thoughts?

[ginjaninja 605]

I have used beets also; it just doesn't have the ability to separate multiple artists with a semicolon yet. Picky, I know, but wanting to see if anyone has found a tagger with support for separating multiple artists.

Support for multiple artists is not so much down to the tagger, so much as the client that is interpretting the tag.

A tag for multiple artists is nothing more that a string with a arbitrarily denoted seperator (Character or sets of characters).

 

Musicbrainz instancing of additional tags eg. artists and albumartists is nothing more than the ID3 specification allowing extensibility...the tagger is free to create as many tags with as many values as it sees fit.. It is a matter of coincidence (conformity) not standardisation that clients like MB3, windows media player, beats concour or do not concur regarding the significance of these tags.

 

So much for all this subjectivity..the solution is to program your tagger to use a separator that all your clients supports. Note even within a single client a given separator may not be supported on all tags..eg WMP treats ; as separator for artists but not albumartists.

Once you have a separator which is compatible accross all your clients for each given multivalue tag, use something like mp3tag's scripting engine to programatically change all tags to how you want/need them.

 

i dont have a strong oppinion on wether MB3 should support musicbrainz decision to use these new tags...philosophically in the long term it seems to fit as musicbrainz is the 'master' system for MB3.

In the short term though, i think the main desire is that Multiple artists and album artists can be separated out for proper fetching, indexing and searching...currently MB3 drops additional albumartists so they dont get in the way of at least proper indexing and search on the 1st value.so for now keep the primary albumartist first/

luke has said that mb3 will fully support multiple album artists at some point..

Edited January 13, 2015 by ginjaninja

[thefirstofthe300 292]

Support for multiple artists is not so much down to the tagger, so much as the client that is interpretting the tag.

A tag for multiple artists is nothing more that a string with a arbitrarily denoted seperator (Character or sets of characters).

 

Musicbrainz instancing of additional tags eg. artists and albumartists is nothing more than the ID3 specification allowing extensibility...the tagger is free to create as many tags with as many values as it sees fit.. It is a matter of coincidence (conformity) not standardisation that clients like MB3, windows media player, beats concour or do not concur regarding the significance of these tags.

 

So much for all this subjectivity..the solution is to program your tagger to use a separator that all your clients supports. Note even within a single client a given separator may not be supported on all tags..eg WMP treats ; as separator for artists but not albumartists.

Once you have a separator which is compatible accross all your clients for each given multivalue tag, use something like mp3tag's scripting engine to programatically change all tags to how you want/need them.

 

i dont have a strong oppinion on wether MB3 should support musicbrainz decision to use these new tags...philosophically in the long term it seems to fit as musicbrainz is the 'master' system for MB3.

In the short term though, i think the main desire is that Multiple artists and album artists can be separated out for proper fetching, indexing and searching...currently MB3 drops additional albumartists so they dont get in the way of at least proper indexing and search on the 1st value.so for now keep the primary albumartist first/

luke has said that mb3 will fully support multiple album artists at some point..

 

I get what you are trying to say. I am just wondering if anybody has managed to configure a tagger to automatically separate the multiple artists with semicolons. I would totally be using Picard to do this if it had an easy configuration option but since it does use the artist vs. artists tag, I can't find a good way that doesn't involve a script that could potentially cause problems down the road.

 

@@Luke Is it possible to use the artists tag if present as it is the MusicBrainz way of tagging? If so, I will add it to the FR forum.

[ginjaninja 605]

I used a set of filters and actions in mp3tag..to split in a semi automatic way..

I filtered for common separators in the multivalue tags..and configure an action for those separators to correct them..via search and replace.

Whenever i add content to library i run it through the filters and actions.

[steve1977 67]

the advantage of having MBS read both the artist and artists tag is that you could have split artists for the artist view (identified by the artists tag, which already has a ";" separation) and then still show the nice and proper name (eg, incl & or feat) when playing the song.

 

isn't it great that mbz has both tags and even better if mbs could read them?

[thefirstofthe300 292]

the advantage of having MBS read both the artist and artists tag is that you could have split artists for the artist view (identified by the artists tag, which already has a ";" separation) and then still show the nice and proper name (eg, incl & or feat) when playing the song.

 

isn't it great that mbz has both tags and even better if mbs could read them?

 

I never thought of this but it would be amazing to be able to do that.

[steve1977 67]

Fully agree, would indeed be amazing and hopefully not too tough for the MBS developers to implement?

[steve1977 67]

I have opened a feature request to bring us this amazing functionality. If you agree, please also pile on it!!!

 

http://mediabrowser.tv/community/index.php?/topic/17529-mbs-support-to-read-artists-albumartists-tag/