Hi. I wonder of anyone can help with this issue. I am lately using Audirvana for playing my music. It uses the GROUPING tag to nicely display tracks on an album by whatever grouping you prefer - for me works (classical). But many of my albums do not have the GROUPING tag populated. So I have been picking away at this as and when.
The other day I noticed that some albums I had changed were not displaying tracks in Groups as desired. Long story short, I have worked out that it is the files I have in ALAC format (about 170 albums) that this happens with. Audirvana is not recognising many of the tags in my ALAC files. No problems with FLAC albums.
I remember I had a similar problem with Minimserver a few years ago and Simon, the developer sorted this so Minimserver recognises all the tags in my ALAC files. I don't really expect the same response from Audirvana - I might be wrong.
I have had a look at the tag mapping in mp3tag and I confess I don't really understand it at all. Is there a way to get mp3tag to save tags in ALAC files that Audirvana will recognise like it does my FLAC files? At the moment I can either convert the files to FLAC, but then most of the tags go blank in mp3tag and I have to repopulate them, or edit every album in Audirvana using its own very clunky tag editing.
Hi @ohrenkino Not really I'm afraid. mp3tag is reading the tags fine in the ALAC files. All of them, including GROUPING, Conductor, Style, Instrument, Ensemble, etc. It's Audirvana that can't see them. After converting the ALAC files to FLAC the tags I mentioned are gone. So I suspect they are being stored in something MP4 specific that mp3tag can read and write to fine, and now Minimserver can read also, but Audirvana can't.
Please note that teh data for a field with the label Grouping should be stored in an MP3tag field named CONTENTGROUP - so please do not mix label and field name.
You could check the extended tags dialogue to see where your player stores the data (if it also writes data to tag fields).
Otherwise, you simply would have to try CONTENTGROUP.
Ok. So if I edit tag panel, and the Grouping tag, in the field selector I can see both CONTENTGROUP and GROUPING, so I picked GROUPING and this works perfectly with FLAC files. If I changed it to CONTENTGROUP would it still be ok in FLAC. And what about CONDUCTOR and STYLE - once again they look perfect in Audirvana and mp3 with FLAC but Audirvana does not see them, and there is no other feild to select in the tag panel editor?
There try CONTENTGROUP.
GROUPING has only a standard field for MP3 but not for MP4 - which would lead to a user-defined field in MP4 files.
Style is no standard field - so you would need a player that can cope with user-defined fields.
Why your player does not interpret CONDUCTOR (which is a standard field) is a question for the player's support.
BTW: conversions from one format to another and then which and how many tag fields are kept after the conversion, depends a lot on the converter. The only reliable way would be to copy the whole tag (which includes all tag fields) from the original file to the converted file with the help of MP3tag and the functions from the Edit menu.
This still does not guarantee that the player can cope with all tag formats.
I have been using ALAC for years as I have multiple Apple devices and was an iTunes user for a long time. The recommendation by @ohrenkino is correct for m4a to use the CONTENTGROUP field. Whether Audirvana uses this field correctly or not is a different question. But that is the "standard" for m4a.
If you want to simplify things, you can create a field Mapping in the options menu. This will make sure any time you edit a m4a file and add the GROUPING tag, mp3tag will store it correctly into the CONTENTGROUP when you Save them.
Type: MP4
Source: GROUPING
Target: CONTENTGROUP
Can you edit tags in Audirvana? Have you tried adding these tag fields there, then opening them in mp3tag to see where these may have been stored? Open the Extended Tags window using Alt + T to see all of the tags in mp3tag after making those changes. If you can confirm these fields you can create additional Mappings.
Thanks @MotleyG That is helpful. I think I see now what is needed in the tag mapping, and how to find out . Yes I can edit tags in Audirvana so I can then trace them back in mp3tag.
I am actually just going to convert them to FLAC. It'll be a piece of work, but I was tidying the tags anyway so the conversion is just an extra step. And @ohrenkino point about the converter was spot on. I am now using DBPoweramp and it preserves the tags so little editing to do, except add any extras.