So Musicbrainz and some other databases use a semi-colon to separate multiple composers - name1; name2; name3 etc. When tracks with that metadata are brought into mp3tag, it is displaying it as "\" (two backslashes) instead of ";"
What makes it worse is if I do a search/replace for either ";" or "\" it finds neither of those characters and I cannot replace them other than manually.
Is this a bug?
What you are seeing with the \\ display in mp3tag is a placeholder to indicate a multi value field. Other programs may indicate this in different ways, such as the semicolon in Musicbrainz you have found.
This can occur in the Composer, Artist, and Genre fields most commonly.
If you are trying to manipulate the line, you may first want to use the MERGE action where you can assign a new separator. This will combine all of the values of the same field name and allow you to make the edits you wish. There is also actions to SPLIT them in a similar fashion.
Just to add some other details to @MotleyG's explanations:
As already mentioned here:
use the extended tags dialogue if you see something peculiar or something is missing that you see in other applications.
In this case you will see several list items with the field name COMPOSER in the extended tags dialogue.
Well here is the problem. And you can feel free to try this. Just tag any track with a semi-colon anywhere in the text. Not anything imported from musicbrainz. Just put in a semi-colon yourself. When opened in mp3tag, it converts that semi-colon to a double backslash. There is no reason it should do that. Because at that point, you can't then search for a semi-colon - or double backslash - and replace it with another character and you should be able to do that.
I will try the MERGE action and report back. I'm not familiar with that so thank you for letting me know about that. In case I'm not being clear, I want to take a metadata field like COMPOSER for instance in the format of name1; name 2; name 3 and replace the semi-colons with commas instead so it reads name1, name 2, name 3. I don't care what characters are technically a separator or not. I want it to read correctly when displayed in a media player app.
Which program do you use to enter the semi-colon?
In my case I'm using dbpoweramp. Any field with a semi-colon gets converted to double backslash by mp3tag.
That would mean that
creates a multi-value field that MP3tag displays with \\ as already described by @MotleyG.
As you actually have separate fields there is no field that has a semi-colon or \\ in it which is why you cannot replace them.
If you want to get a single field with semi-colons, you have to merge the fields first with a separator unequal to \\.
What did the check with the extended tags dialogue reveal?
Ok, thank you for the clarification. That makes total sense now. I didn't realize that it was indicating a duplicate field of the same name. I thought it was one field.
So to report back @MotleyG 's suggestion was exactly what I was looking for. If I merge the fields and then choose the separator of my choice, everything is merged into one field displayed in a manner that is more readable in media library players.
And yes, you are correct. Extended tags shows duplicate fields of the same type.
Thanks everyone for your help and apologies for not understanding multi-value fields. Clearly not a bug.
When using the MERGE action, you can just use the desired ", " and this will take care of what you are aiming to do in a single step.
It would be interesting to see what dbpoweramp makes of fields with a semicolon.
It could well be that any edit in that program creates multi-value fields again.
That does seem to be the case. If I enter semi-colon in any field in dbpoweramp it is creating a multi-value field.
It maybe worthwhile to find a separator that leaves merged fields as single fields. What about the slash /?
