This issue drives me nuts!
I use <;(space)> as a delimiter in the %genre% field. All is fine, But let Foobar2000 get hold of the tags by mistake and it will change them to separator to <\>. When these are then viewed in MP3tag, they display fine in the Tag Panel, but only the first genre tag shows in the tag list. This makes it impossible to check quickly because only one song shows in the Tag Panel at a time. To see if any have been changed to <\>, you have to scroll through them all. I haven't found a way to search for <\>; maybe there is one?
Does any of this make sense?
If so, any idea what can be done?
I can't really understand why the genre view differs between the Tag Panel and the main list. They are both configure to show %genre%.
Can you please show us a screenshot from the content of GENRE from Alt+T?
And also a screenshot from your Tag Panel with the "same" content?
By design, Foobar will separate these single field values into separate ones. This is the same thing in mp3tag if you use the separator of two slashes // as well. If you want to put them back together again, you can use the Action to Merge them.
I believe there is an option in Foobar to disable this from happening. But it has been a long time since I used Foobar, so I can't advise where to look for that.
Modify the column definition for the Genre column in
Value: $meta_sep(genre,\\)
This will show the genre just like in the tag panel.
Thanks for much for the replies. I have now added $meta_sep(genre,\) to the column and it does display fine.
This seems to be more of an issue with FB2K, then, than the rather wonderful MP3Tag!
What's really annoying now is that I have just changed all the incorrect \ separators to <; > using the mp3tag option here:
(only about 5,000 files were affected).
Now I'm thinking that it might have been better to have done it the other way round and changed the rest (a lot more files, but it is only once - I hope!) from <; > to \. Then nothing would have been messed up again in the future by FB2K, etc.
Or would it?! Before I do, can anyone think of any downsides to that option?
Many thanks for the help. (Obviously, all the \ above should be double \ )
The difference was answered elsewhere, and they now display in the same way.
Many thanks for your reply, though.
As soon as you edit that particular field contents with semicolon blank in Foobar, Foobar will translate that again into multivalue-fields - which are represented in MP3tag by the \\ or that you can see as several fields of the same type in the extended tags dialogue.
So, the downside would be: never edit a field with semicolon blank in Foobar.
If you do, you would have to merge those fields again in MP3tag.
If you now think which alternative is the best ... hardly any other player supports multi-value fields. So if you want to see all the data in the fields in other players, stay with the semicolon syntax and be prepared to merge the fields or use only MP3tag to modify this tag field.
You can filter for files with more than 1 genre field with:
"$meta(genre,1)" PRESENT
That final bit of info would have saved me hours yesterday.
Thank you SO much! 