Tag syntax

Support
#1

Hi

I'm quite new to MP3Tag ... what a great program! So useful. I have quite a music collection on my player (Sony NWZ A-15)and only recently learned about the value of doing some proper housekeeping on the tags.

Here's my question (I've done some searching across the forums but can't find a quick answer)

I noticed a little while ago that a CD I imported had automatically tagged the ARTIST field this way:

               Mark Knopfler\\\\Emmy Lou Harris

The use of the backslashes seems to have the effect of listing the artist names separately in my player but I cannot be sure it always works that way (for some albums it does not seem to work).

I also noticed that the ALBUMARTIST field occasionally includes a semi-colon. I can't find an example now but after a few experiments I cannot work out what is the effect of the semi-colon.

I also noticed that the backslash is rejected by the ALBUMARTIST field.

My question: is there a handy guide to the syntax of tags? Put another way, is there a handy guide to the use of special characters in tags and their effects?

Thanks for any advice.

#2

No.
And the simple reason is that it is up to the player to interpret the data.
The double backslash is MP3tag's representation of a multi-value field - you see the Mark Knopfler\\Emmy Lou Harris as 2 fields of the type ARTIST in the extended tags dialogue (alt-T).

Not all players can cope with multi-value fields but show only one of them, e.g. only Mark Knopfler or only Emmy Lou Harris.

WMP uses the "semicolon blank" as separator in the fields for ARTIST and COMPOSER and shows separate entries in the lists of contributing artists and composers.
The field ALBUMARTIST behaves just like the highlander: there can only be one.
íTunes ignores "semicolon blank" and shows the string as it is