getmusicbee.com
Support => Questions => Topic started by: stopbrickwalling on January 22, 2020, 11:03:13 PM
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I have all my music files tagged with Album Artist, Artist, Sort Album Artist and Sort Artist tags.
Basically, I use the Album Artist and Artist tags if I want to sort by first name of the artists.
I use the Album Artist tag as a singular artist but I list all artists on a track separated by a semi-colon in the Artist tag.
This works great for me on MusicBee as this creates an individual entry for each Artist in my library view if I group to look for that.
Then if I want to sort by last name as I would find in a music store, then I use the Sort Album Artist tag.
And then use the Sort Artist Tag with multiple artists separated by a semi-colon but of course listed as last name, first name format (just like I do with the Artist tag).
The problem I am encountering is that MusicBee handles the ";" semi-colon separated artists in Artist tag differently than it handles the Sort Artist tag for the same files.
In other words,
Artist: Jimmy Buffett; Toby Keith gets displayed as Jimmy Buffett; Toby Keith with separate entries. (preferable)
Sort Artist: Buffett; Keith, Toby get displayed and sorted as one combo artist Buffett, Jimmy/Keith, Toby (";" is changed to a "/" and the separate artists are recognized as ONE artist).
This is not desirable for me because albums released by an artist with several duets on the album get all splintered up in the Sort Artist library view.
I assume MusicBee is working as it should and I must have out of normal expectations for my Sort Artist tag handling?
That said, is there something I can do to make MusicBee handle the ";" the exact same way in all tags?
I basically want my tags to be handled consistently...I just want to use the "sort" tags when I want to sort by last name....but I want MB to read the artist separators the same way for all.
Here is an example of an album released by one singular artist but it has many duets and guest appearances.
This is a nightmare when it creates a new artist entry for each unique combination of duet artists.
If anything I have said here is not clear or anyone needs more info, please let me know.
To be clear, I am not talking about compilation albums that I have tagged as Album Artist "Various Artists".
I'm strictly talking about the behavior regarding Sort Artist tag.
(http://www.mediafire.com/convkey/0aad/udita963yayqtr8zg.jpg)
(http://www.mediafire.com/convkey/b235/pt87a7sly6564yhzg.jpg)
(http://www.mediafire.com/convkey/cd03/9kh7073nm8y3wblzg.jpg)
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(http://www.mediafire.com/convkey/8f6c/kfd8izxmwkn9f3kzg.jpg)
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Do you have the custom sort tags enabled on the sorting tab of the tag editor?
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I've never used the tag editor or that screen in MusicBee, so seems the answer is no, it is not checked.
When I do look at that now, the presets for custom sorting do not refer to the Sort Artist tag.
Just to confirm, the Album Artist, Artist, and Sort Album Artist tags are all doing just fine in my application of them.
(I guess I would have problems with Sort Album Artist too if I was inputting multiple values there but I'm not doing that).
I don't want to do anything that will change the current MusicBee behavior with the Album Artist or Artist tags.
(http://www.mediafire.com/convkey/bfe7/er4nmuqsgavn05fzg.jpg)
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I'm not 100% sure if this is what you want. It might be the opposite. But if you enable the custom sort tags, then each separate artist value can have its own sort value, even when there are multiple artists in a track.
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If I am understanding correctly, I think that would head me in the opposite direction of what I'm trying to accomplish.
When I group by ARTIST, MB shows an entry for both multiple artists.
In the example above, that track is listed under ARTIST: Jimmy Buffett and also under ARTIST: TOBY KEITH.
This is great.
I want that same behavior with SORT ARTIST except of course the tags are formatted "last name, first name" and so the sort would be by last name vs. first name that ALBUM ARTIST or ARTIST tags provides.
So I would like to see that track have an entry under Sort Artist: Buffett, Jimmy and also under Sort Artist: Keith, Toby.
What I don't want is to see a Sort Artist: Buffett, Jimmy/Keith, Toby which in reality is creating a third artist entry (plus others for every duet on that Buffett album) which is the current behavior.
Make sense?
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I think I'm with you. I don't think what you're asking for is currently possible. With Custom Sorting (which only works in MusicBee), if you display artists and want to see the track under both Toby Keith and Jimmy Buffett, but sort them as Keith, Toby and Buffett, Jimmy, you can do that. MusicBee won't directly split Sort Artist the same way.
The custom sorting feature was introduced to make it possible to correctly sort the individual values when a track has multiple artists, but it directly affects the artist field only. The whole idea of sort tags is that they exist so that you can sort by something different than you have displayed.
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My 'Additional Tagging Tools' plugin skills are rusty to say the least, but shouldn't it be not too hard to achieve it with that?
edit:
I see you are using wav files.
Unless that is a very deliberate decision, I would strongly advice you to use flac.
Tagging can be very problematic for wav files.
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B.t.w., either I am missing something, or something else is causing this?
Doing a quick test on this, and for me it works as expected:
(https://i.imgur.com/XmpaSke.png)
How do you get the sort artist tag populated?
Have you tried it with mp3 or flac files?
Perhaps this is indeed caused by wav tagging?
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Huh, looks like I'm wrong about this. Nice catch, hiccup
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Thanks for everyone's input so far.
I'll try to answer Hiccup's questions and do some additional testing on my end.
-Yes, I am consciously using wav files. Even though flac is lossless, it is still compression/processor power being used and with storage so cheap these days, I ripped everything as wav. I understand that in theory there should be no sound quality difference although I have certainly seen it debated. I have 50,000 wav files at this point. I have had good luck using dBpoweramp and it's ability to save the wag tags in a chunk that were being read well by MusicBee. It's only lately that I started dabbling in the Sort Artist domain in order to sort by last name that I have started running into behavior that was not what I expected. So I am just trying to figure out what is happening here so I can adjust my tags as needed, if there is something I can do to affect the desired behavior.
-All my files were created using dBpoweramp ripper. All metadata from the automatic providers was reviewed prior to rip and edited to conform to a consistent tagging strategy for all files. Any after rip edits were made using the dBpoweramp ID Tag Update plugin and built in dbpa converter.
-All my wav files were ripped from my own physical CD collection. There are no downloads and I have not used any 3rd party software to systematically search/update my tags. All my tags are what was input at time of rip or edited afterward with dbpa tag editor. I used a semi-colon in any Artist or Sort Artist tags where the track had multiple artists. All my Album Artist and Sort Album Artist tags are a single performer.
Hiccup...your screenshot does indeed to show that you are not getting the same behavior. It seems all your artist related fields are reading the ";". I wonder why the difference?
Since I didn't have any MP3 or flac files, I haven't really done any testing with those, so I will convert some files to flac and see what happens on a testing basis. Maybe there is something that dbpa is doing/not doing with the ";" tags that gives me this behavior. I won't give up on it and will report back on my progress.
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I'm just not sure. All my multiple artists tags are using the ";" semi-colon space as the separator but MB reads the Artist tags as "Artist 1; Artist 2" while it reads the Sort Artist tag as "Artist 1/Artist 2".
It seemed like Hiccup showed in his screenshot that this was not happening in his use.
Can anyone give me a clue where to look next. I'm reaching wit's end.
(http://www.mediafire.com/convkey/45de/k49bdcchll2boeozg.jpg)
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The more I test things, the more confused I think I am getting.
I converted the Buffett album from wav to both flac and mp3 for testing purposes.
I created a new library for each to switch back and forth in MB.
Same tags on all of the tracks...multiple artists separated by "; " and here's what I get in MB.
wav view:
(http://www.mediafire.com/convkey/cd60/bmt4hpq5qepqhzszg.jpg)
flac view:
(http://www.mediafire.com/convkey/0648/jt0527mdb28phxbzg.jpg)
mp3 view:
(http://www.mediafire.com/convkey/758f/vcg8vnpyptked5uzg.jpg)
For some, MB is reading the "; " to split the artists and for some formats it is combining the artists together.
Any ideas?
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I think the discrepancy would have to do with translating between tagging formats. WAV files generally have some version of ID3 tags, which is the same format mp3s use. FLACS have a different format. Usually MusicBee can translate between then pretty easily, though.
What do you see in the tag inspector for these three different formats? That will show you exactly what's in the file.
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Before you start pulling out (more) hairs because of this:
Besides the chance that your other tools are perhaps writing / instead of ; or perhaps do other things a bit differently than MusicBee; I just took a better look at a wav file I used for testing, and that shows that MusicBee seems to have some internal handling of wav tags that is different from mp3 or flac files:
(https://i.imgur.com/ZkOUIGU.png)
As you can see, the main panel displays both 'sort artists' just as I had manually entered them in the tag editor, but the tag inspector displays something else entirely.
(It could be that MusicBee stores manually entered 'artist sort' info in it's library file instead of in the music file itself? I have no idea.)
From my screenshot it looks like those are (at least similar to) id3 tags, but maybe your tools write vorbis or ape tags for your wav files, and your wav files will look different in tag inspector?
Again, I have no idea; wav tagging is very badly documented, and there are no clear proposals or guidelines for it.
(except for the professional audio and broadcast world; they often use wav metadata to a mind-boggling extent, but for whole different purposes)
You could raise further questions or possibly post bug reports or wishes about this, but considering that the sole developer of MB is currently not able to do as much work on MB as usual (for at least a couple of months), allow me to repeat my advice:
Switch from wav to flac.
Contrary to what you seem to have read somewhere, there is NO difference in sound quality.
Bit-perfect is bit-perfect.
The earth is not flat. Epstein didn't 'you know what'. Flac is not in any way different in sound quality than wav.
It will very likely save you from much more tagging troubles in the future in case you are going to make use of even more advanced tagging features.
And it will free up up to some 50% of your storage space.
And (this might be the seller), you have a much better chance on getting support on this forum.
I for one will usually not jump in when a user has complaints about tagging while he is using wav.
Some basic wav tagging may work, but you shouldn't expect anything close to predictable perfection.
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Everyone has been very helpful and I appreciate it.
So I'm not ready to convert my 50,000 wav files to flac yet, but I have been playing around with an album of flac files today and have run into some issues there as well. Maybe someone can point me in a good direction that will complete the sale to flac.
I have come to realize that my dBpoweramp ripper/converter/ID Tag Update codec can affect how music players read the multiple artist tags.
I've achieved much of what I would like testing flac but can't seem to overcome the following:
All the files have Album Artist, Artist, Artist Sort (Sort Artist is MB's term) and Album Artist Sort (MB = Sort Album Artist).
The MB tag inspector reflects reading the multiple artists semi-colon separators and even reading the sort tags appropriately as last name, first name....BUT, the MB library stills shows all as first name, last name.
In other words, MB tag inspector shows correctly but the MB player library does not show them the same way as shown in tag inspector.
Why the disconnect between MB tag inspector and my library?
What is shown in the tag inspector is actually what I want but it's not translating to the MB flac library.
(http://www.mediafire.com/convkey/290d/6qxmyhm1uvsqxbrzg.jpg)
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I think what's happening there is that your tagger is not writing the sort field the way MusicBee expects. If I add a sort artist value through MusicBee, it shows up in the tag inspector with tag code ARTISTSORT, not Artist Sort. If I enter something under the tag name Artist Sort, MusicBee doesn't see it.
Update: Looks like there might be an option you can set to fix this in dbpoweramp: https://forum.dbpoweramp.com/showthread.php?23288-Get-Sort-Tags-to-FLAC
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So if a tag is showing in the MusicBee Tag Inspector, that doesn't mean that MusicBee is actually "reading" the tag?
I can see where if I add sort tags without spaces like ArtistSort then MusicBee does seem to read them as expected with last name, first name. I guess even though dbpa's own tag editor displays Album Artist, it is actually written as ALBUMARTIST with no spaces behind the scenes so that explains why it works for ALBUMARTIST because it's actually written as MusicBee is looking for it. (Thanks to Hiccup for telling me about Hex editors today.)
As for that guy that posted in the dbpa forum, I really have no idea what he is babbling about. The dbpa ripper has fields at both the top and bottom of the screen for metadata and you can input tags to be written during the rip in both locations. Not sure what he was talking about otherwise.
So I now see if I add a tag thru MB, it formats tag code as ARTISTSORT.
i know that flac tagging is not standardized, but I am surprised to find there is a discrepancy between how dpba and MusicBee are handlng these 2 specific sort tags.
I wonder should I just add a 2nd set of tags ARTISTSORT and ALBUMARTISTSORT to run parallel with my existing tags with the space.....or should I batch convert to rename those existing to tags to remove the "space"?
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So if a tag is showing in the MusicBee Tag Inspector, that doesn't mean that MusicBee is actually "reading" the tag?
Correct. That's why Tag Inspector is so useful. It allows you to see all present tags in a file. Sometimes a file can even have more than one tagging protocol included, e.g. both idv3 and APE. You would not be able to see that if you didn't use Tag Inspector.
Psychoadept is right; it's because of the difference in tag names that different software programs may use for vorbis.
In this case, MusicBee (and both MP3Tag and MusicBrainz' Picard) read and write ARTISTSORT, while dBpoweramp writes Artist Sort.
You can set a mapping for that in dBpoweramp.
It's under DSP effects. (yeah, a bit unexpected)
Add 'ID Tag Processing' as a DSP, and under it's settings you can add your mappings:
(https://i.imgur.com/Ok3PW9Q.png)
This should work.
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P.S.
In case you decide to start batch converting to flac, be sure to test if there are perhaps other tags that you may need to set a mapping for so that they are carried over correctly.
It will be rather difficult to fix them after the files have been converted to flac.
This may be of help:
https://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=26177.msg148929#msg148929
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Thanks everyone for your time and guidance.
I recently got a new Windows 10 computer. Up until that point, I had been cruising along just fine with my old Windows 7 machine and using my dbpa and MB with my wav files (I hadn't updated my old PC OS because my motherboard/video card wouldn't support high res on W10). What really stirred up this recent flurry of issues was wanting to start sorting my library by last name instead of first name that I had been doing forever. I guess the Album Artist and Artists tags are more "standard" than the Sort Artist and Album Sort Artist tags, so I had not been having any problems in my old configuration and usage.
At this point, since I am dealing with a new computer and some newly purchased 5TB hard drives for storage/backup, I think I better make sure everything is tight before I start converting files because I could never find the time to re-rip and re-tag these 50,000 files. I just need to make sure I'm backed up and don't screw anything up in the conversion process if I do it.
Thanks again. Y'all have been wonderful. I'll post back if more q's arise. :)
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I now see I completely overlooked you are a long-time user, and even contributed with skins.
Sorry for that.
I just need to make sure I'm backed up and don't screw anything up in the conversion process if I do it.
Does that mean you had 50.000 music files without backups of them?
Living on the edge, oi?
Good luck with the transitions!
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No and sort of temporarily yes.
My music files are over 2TB.
My old W7 computer was limited to reading only up to a 2TB hard drive...even though I tried larger, my system couldn't see the larger storage capacity. So I was was limited with 2 completely full 2TB external drives plus a certain part on my internal system drive and a partition for back up (not ideal but it was what it was.)
Along with my new W10 PC, I bought 2 5TB external drives to use with my new PC.
So the "no and yes"...I successfully transferred all 50k files over to one of my new 5TB drives, but I haven't backed that one up to the 5TB backup because I wanted to finish updating my sorting tags before writing the the backup.
If disaster hits, I still have those older 2TB drives, just not with my tag updates I have been doing plus some recent new rips on this new PC. So I'm not flying totally backup-less, but it is a fact that I would have some work to do if I had to reconcile backing up from those old drives vs. what has been added to my new ones.
Probably TMI...but since you mentioned it...LOL.
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It's only 145 days worth of tagged files with almost every track AccurateRip confirmed accurate. ???
Storing on computer is a lot easier than finding places for all those phyiscal CD's.
MusicBee has been my favorite player by far.
(http://www.mediafire.com/convkey/56dc/x4ted0on74kgerkzg.jpg)