Publisher tag not embedded properly

[MituButChi]

Hi.
I'm editing tags for my audiobooks (.m4b) and everything works flawlessly except for the Publisher tag.

I added a new column and choose field & value %publisher% for it (the %publisher% field is an already available extended field in Mp3tag). I added the values for my audiobooks and hit Save.

When I right click on the file and hit Properties, as well as when I load my audiobooks into an audiobook player, the Publisher field is empty.

I check the file with MediaInfo, the tag is registered as pub when everything else I need works just fine and shows as proper values (Title, Subtitle, Artist, etc.)

Is there any reason for this and how to get it to work properly? Also can we have extended fields for language and author as well? Thank you.

P/s: This is irrelevant but now I see that most ID3 tag reader register audiobook narrator as composer, while author is registered as artist and performer. Shouldn't it be the other way around? Is there anyway I can change this?

[ohrenkino]

See e.g. here:

MP4 Publisher compatibility

On version 3.11 support for the MP4 field PUBLISHER was added: [2021-10-29] REL: VERSION 3.11 (for Windows 11/10/8.1/8/7) [2021-10-20] NEW: added support for MP4 fields NARRATOR and PUBLISHER. That means that the Mp3tag name PUBLISHER is now saved to the MP4 frame "©pub" instead of "----:com.apple.iTunes:PUBLISHER" (as described in Tag Field Mappings – Mp3tag Documentation). This leads to an incompatibility with other software (e.g. foobar2000, MediaInfo), which expect the publisher to be…

@MituButChi

Shouldn't it be the other way around? Is there anyway I can change this?

see the FAQs:

Actions and batch-operations

How to swap the contents of 2 tag fields? Example how to swap TITLE and ARTIST: Create a new action in an existing action group or make a new action group. Action type: Guess values Source format: %title%~%artist% Guessing pattern: %artist%~%title% Note: The ~ sign is just used to separate the two fields, you could take any other sign that does not appear in your fields, e.g. ¢ or an extended unicode character like ∞ or ∑.

[MituButChi]

Thank you for your reply.

1. I checked the thread you linked but it seems to be a question from @VortX that they themselves haven't found the answer?

2. You misunderstood my question. I know how to use Action two swap values of two fields and I wasn't asking about that.
   My question was: Now the tag reader is reading artist as author and composer as narrator. Then it shows kinda funny in the tag list: Performer: [author name]; Composer: [narrator name].
   Isn't the author the one "composed" the book and the narrator the one "performed" the book? Now it gets all mixed up.
   I understand that because the book gets "attached" to the author, it's their property, so they get the artist field, but the performer and the composer fields don't make much sense, it just bugs me.

[ohrenkino]

@MituButChi

You misunderstood my question. I know how to use Action two swap values of two fields and I wasn't asking about that.

So, what do you think MP3tag can do about the implementation of your player except move field contents from one field to another one?
If that was a feature question about the player, I would think that such a question would best be asked in the support for the player.
And once you found out how it should be, MP3tag will probably help you to get the right contents in the correct fields.

[MituButChi]

That was just a side question tagged along because it was bugging my mind. I just thought maybe someone would know, we don't have to focus on that.

[Crissov]

In MP4 files like your .m4b, Mp3tag stores PUBLISHER information in the ©pub box. This may not be supported by your playback software, which might expect it as part of the XML in ITUNMOVI.

The documentation for MediaInfo is lacking details for its MP4 tag support. Its source code repository has no file dedicated to it in the folder one would expect to find it in – they are handled elsewhere. Alas, it’s indeed lacking support for this particular field.

Support Publisher metadata in MP4 tags

[Nolaine]

There is a dedicated Narrator tag that Audible uses (©nrt) but since not all audiobooks come from Audible, most of the audiobook community uses the composer tag instead for tagging.

Artist/Performer is used for the author because it's the most prominent tag for a person associated with the media, with Composer being the second most commonly viewed tag.

For your own use, you can certainly massage the metadata any way you wish, but if it's something you intend to share (say, recording public domain audiobooks for a project like Librivox or whatever) then you probably want to stick with those community standards. I totally get being OCD and hating that the community standards aren't an actual accurate reflection of the reality of an audiobook, but we're dealing with tagging systems that were created for music and then just sort of spread out to audiobooks.

If you want to cover your bases (i.e. have accurate metadata for your own satisfaction, but also use the community standard metadata for whatever app you're using) I would do it this way:

Author(s) (iTunes / ID3 -- I will try to include options for both 2.4 and 2.3)
Artist:
©ART / TPE1 (standard)
©aut or auth / TIPL: Author or IPLS: Author (OCD-version)

First Author (for multi-author books, or editor of an anthology. Whoever you want to be most recognized/searchable for this book)
aART / TPE2 (standard)

Narrator(s)
©com or ©wrt / TCOM (standard)
©nrt or perf / TMCL: Narrator or IPLS: Narrator (custom)

Publisher
Honestly, there are, like, 2-3 different tags that can be used for this. ©pub/TPUB are both the most common and the most accurate, but as @ohrenkino pointed out, some apps won't recognize this. If they don't, they're probably looking for ©lab (label -- not sure if there is an ID3 equivalent) or possibly even the studio tag, which I can't remember off the top of my head.

Series
If I had my druthers, I'd actually list individual books in a series the way discs in a multi-disc album are tagged. So "Album" would be the series title, and then "Title" would be the book title, and you'd use the "disc#" tag for the series index. However, I came late to the party wherein the community standards--what little there are for this purpose--were established, so I was not consulted. So there are any number of ways to do this, and none of them are going to be universal. Here are a couple, however:

Audible uses series and series-part for this purpose (I don't remember off the top of my head what the MP4 code is for these, but I think it's one that Audible created and not part of the standard library).

I think that tag probably gets lost when converting to ID3 though, so you could create TXXX: Series and TXXX: Series Index tags for this. That's one option.

Some people use the Grouping or Content Group tags for this:
©grp / TIT1 - Series title

A more precise way to go is to use the movement/movement index tags:
©mvn / MNVN - Series title
©mvi and MVIN - Series index
That seems to be the second-most popular option, probably because those tags already exist in both MP4/Quicktime tagging and ID3 tagging.

If you have books that are in a multi-series universe (eg. Terry Brooks' Shannara universe, you could also use the "Work" tags in addition to the "Movement" tags:
©wrk / TIT1 - Universe title

Since I prefer to use .m4b files rather than .mp3, I like to go with the tags available for TV Shows:
tvsh - series title
tven - book title
tves - series index
tvnn - Universe title
tvsn - Universe index (i.e. where the sub-series falls within the universe as a whole, so you know which subseries to read in which order.)

There's no real advantage either way, since I don't believe most apps look for series data (at most, they look for the subtitle so they can display "Series Title, Book Index")

Good luck!