I conclude from your comments that you see the PC and MP3Tag as the center of your music environment. In my opinion, that was and is not the goal of Mp3Tag. Mp3Tag is
intended for convenient editing and storage of metadata. The display and evaluation of this metadata is then usually the responsibility of file or streaming players.
The usefulness of the metadata - unless it is intended exclusively as referenceable data information - generally depends on whether and how a playback software or a hardware player is able to evaluate and display it. The vast majority of Mp3Tag users therefore populate their files with metadata so that their playback environment displays them to them. This playback environment is almost always not the PC; rather, smartphones, MP3 players, home streaming devices, hi-fi systems, car radios, etc. are used.
In most cases, the PC serves as a work device that can of course also be used for playback. I consider a use in which Mp3Tag serves as the main playback center to be rather exotic.
Personally, I don't prefer all-in-one solutions suitable for every purpose, but rather specialists like MP3Tag, who can do one thing well, but not everything, and perhaps only partially well. For me, Mp3Tag is the specialist for metadata processing and not a music playback center or a database.
Apologies for the delay in getting back to you - still working through a very odd mishap, for no apparent reason a folder I was working on in the external drive where I store the music suddenly disappeared along with some 80+ files. It's not in the recycle bin nor showing up with a quick file recovery scan. Just gone with no trace.
It's up to the user but in my opinion any field should have the ability to store a hyperlink - for instance my collection because of lack of storage space is practically all made up of single titles. I do keep the album title as a reference so it would be very advantageous if it stored the text title as a hyperlink (to take you directly to its online page of the music website of the my choosing).
The hyperlink does need any validation - it's simply a navigation tool, a shortcut to the place where the information you link to is located which when clicked upon takes you there. For lyrics - the song title acts as the display text whilst the link is stored internally (https taken out) /www.lyrics.com/lyric/857456/Mariah+Carey (/All+I+Want+for+Christmas+Is+You, see below or hover your mouse over the link to see if at the bottom of your page in your browser (I use Firefox):
So that takes care of your remark "the song text actually quotes that as part of the lyrics" if I understood it rightly.
Hummmm.....I am looking at WWW or WWWAUDIOSOURCE - which by their titles would indicate that they would already be set up for hyperlinking. Not so, if these fields already "deal with hyperlinks" how come when I enter a hyperlink in the corresponding tag text box nothing happens? Where are the instructions to create a clickable hyperlink in them?
It is rather hard to describe a function that is not there.
It is not implemented in MP3tag to click on the contents of any arbitrary field and call an application that interprets the found data.
You can store text that in the end functions like a hyperlink if that field is interpreted by the target application. MP3tag is not the target application, MP3tag is the tool to maintain the metadata.
So, with MP3tag you can enter the data in a field but you cannot execute any function that needs that data to be interpreted.
And coming back to my initial question: do you know any application that plays audio files and also interprets hyperlinks?
I've tried your suggestion, poster, which I thank you for. It works fine to open the browser but it does not take me to the actual page. I noticed an apostrophe at the end of the hyperlink which might have been causing the problem which I removed and then tried it with Edge, Firefox and Opera (don't use Chrome)> no luck.
The shown apostrophe at the end was a typo. I wanted to preformat the link so that it is shown as text and missed the apostrophe at the start. I corrected that.
My suggestion works here with Edge and Firefox too. So there must be some misunderstandings and fault in your tools-configuration, probably the field with the hyperlink itself. I made my tests with the fictional selfdefined tagfield HYPERLINK and put the hyperlink inside this created field, but you can naturally insert the hyperlink in any suitable tagfield, i..e ALBUM.
If this still does not work for you tell us exactly what you did and show us screenshot as Lyricslover already wrote.
Well, there is a standard for ID3v2-tagfields and there are definitions for what content and in what form these tagfields have to be filled. Have a look at this document for ID3v2.3.
So i.e. inserting a hyperlink in a tagfield like YEAR (TYER-frame) would be against the definition of this field:
The 'Year' frame is a numeric string with a year of the recording. This frames is always four characters long (until the year 10000).
Anyway you even can ignore the standard and use my suggested tools-solution for this field (not that I recommend that) and most other tagfields and it will work with Mp3Tag, but I don't know other software like players that work with hyperlinks.
Correction: The hyperlink does not need any validation
That's the point of this discussion - it should.
I have not researched it but what immediately comes to mind are browsers and they do good job of it. But then again it really depends on what you mean by "interprets hyperlinks".
So what has that to do with it playing audio files and interpreting hyperlinks? I don't get the association you attribute between the two. They are in my opinion separate activities.
MP3Tag as far as I understand is not an audio player - presumably when clicking on the icon displayed in the Tag list it opens the system's audio player to play the file through interpreting a "link/ hyperlink" or whatever data passed to it by the program. Is that how it works? Is that not calling an application that interprets the found data and plays it by the target application?
If that is the case and using this as an example and in the same vein then a button that displays the default browser's icon, placed next to a tag text box could it read its content and automatically recognize by its structure that it is a URL and open it in a browser, in the same way that MP3TAG opens the default target audio player which interprets the data presumably by recognizing it as an audio file and dealing with it ?
Is the online database lookups not the same interpreting issue? How does that work? What target application is used to interpret and fetch the data?
What intrigues me is that as an editor as in " MP3TAG The universal tag editor " and in terms of text editing / word processing why MP3Tag is incapable of recognizing and deal with hyperlinking when QJot (a 599 KB text editor) which I use daily for quick note taking and saving can.
What with my PC continuing in constantly misbehaving and having to change internet providers I apologise for not responding earlier to you folks.
Hip, hip Hoorah!!!! - Houston hyperlinking has taken off. Ta very much and after several tries I got poster's self-defined tag to work as well. Thanks to you both for your much appreciated help and altruistic assistance.
In fact thank you to all who contributed to this post.
Thank you too, ohrenkino, for your contributions. Not quite the ideal but it is a start.
I was looking at the instructions for using Discogs which I had not used before and I found it interesting that it states:
Allow access for Mp3tag in the Browser window that opens automatically
and it opens my default browser which to me indicates that there is an existing mechanism which a proper hyperlink utility could use to call "the program that has the task to deal with the forwarded data." in other words the browser.
Is it true that Tools is limited to 9 tools? So if you have a number sites that you would like to assign tags links to, it is restrictive.
Some URLs are a mile long and trying to highlight one of those would be a task in itself let alone if it exceeds the maximum number of characters allowed in the text input box..
It seems that only a suitable text format stands between the Tools options and a fully fledged hyperlink implementation.
My programming skills are next to null and I should perhaps start a new post or search it before asking this but if you wanted to play a file with a different player than the default one could the same Tool techniques be used ? Would you have to add a field that contains the file's location on disk which when highlighted and Control clicked would do the trick?
No there is no limit of Tools you can add.
There is only a limit of 9 which you can directly call with CTRL + the number of the tool position.
So CTRL + 1 will call the first tool, CTRL + 2 the second tool until CTRL + 9.
From the 10th tool on you have to call it from the context menu.
Maybe so but without the answer from LyricsLover and his informative screenshot I would not be able to ask him:
L are the control shortcuts in your image, (CTRL-1 NEU) for instance, ones that you have added yourself to the image as similar ones don't appear in my copy of the program?
