; Changing to \\

[Exiled]

Due to the nature of the issue I am unable to search for this anywhere so please excuse me if this has been discussed before.

I separate multiple artists or vocalists by "; " )semicolon space (ex. SHU; GUCCI). I use Mp3Tag to mass edit tags before I add them to MusicBee and use MusicBee to fix a single tag if I see something. Other than that I do not use MusicBee to tag or auto tag anything. However a major issue has been occurring. I am noticing tags randomly for some reason changing from ; to \\ (ex. SHU\\GUCCI). It happens under the artist tag and I have also see in a custom tag I made %VOCALS%. It does not happen to every song, but it happens to a lot of them. I already had to go through and change them back but for some reason it happened again. I am not sure if MusicBee is doing something or if somehow playing a file on fubar2000 causes it to edit the tag. It seems that when it happens it happens to the entire album. I have never enabled auto tagging on MusicBee and I am not sure if MusicBee is to blame. Nothing else should be applying tags to my music besides Mp3tag and fubar2000 for replay gain.

Any help would be appreciated.

[redwing]

MB would never do that. Mp3tag uses \\ between multiple artists, so check if mp3tag is doing something while bulk editing.

[Exiled]

I am not sure what might be causing it in regards to Mp3Tag. It is inconsistent as to what changes from ; to \\. Something I did notice is that all the albums I went back to and removed the \\ and changed it back to ; now have \\ again. I have not done any editing on them since then that I hadnt done to everything else that doesn't have that issue.

EDIT: I found backups of the tags before this issue occurred. I will mess around with Mp3Tag to see if something causes it to mess up.

[Exiled]

After looking on the Mp3tag forums it looks like there is an issue with it and Mp3tag is somehow auto splitting tags with a given separator.

[Exiled]

Sorry for the spam. After doing some testing I was able to recreate the issue. MusicBee is the cause of the tags changing. If I update the multiple artist splitter, which I never do manually, it adds \\ as the separator. The issue I have is that I never go into this dialog and update it. I only ever just change the artist field. There seems to be some bug with this automatically splitting the artist. It is also editing the %VOCALS% field and removing the ; and everything after it which was not a field I touched.

[Bee-liever]

They aren't changing.
Mp3tag displays an item separator as "\\" and MusicBee displays it as "; "

[Exiled]

I was about to add that. The problem I am having besides the fact that it displays different from what I am used to is that it removes part of the tag on the %VOCALS% field. Before I use the field separator the vocals field shows up in Mp3tag as "Mei Ayakura; Tsubaki Ichimatsu" but after I use the Multiple Artist Splitter it shows up as "Mei Ayakura" in Mp3tag. If I look at at it in MusicBee it shows up properly. I guess I was freaking out over it not showing up and nothing is lost.

I am still not sure why it started to split things in the first place without me telling it to.

However there is what I think is a bug. The Multiple Artist Splitter is splitting tags other than the artist tag when I am only editing the artist field. Correct me if I am wrong and this is how it is supposed to act.

[Bee-liever]

If you use the "Extended Tags..." display in Mp3tag, the %VOCALS% field items should show as separate entries.

I believe (no pun intended    ) it's to do with the way they are encoded by MB to show each entry on a different line.

[Exiled]

I was able to get Mp3tag to show the custom field with the separators properly. I am still stuck on what caused MusicBee to separate tags in the first place besides when I manually went in and manually told it to when I was trying to figure out this issue. Up until now I have not used that function yet something has been causing it to activate.

When I use the Multiple Artist Splitter, it seems to affect every field for me.  Correct me if I am wrong but the Multiple Artists Splitter should ONLY edit the artist field?

[Bee-liever]

As I said, I think it has something to do with the way MB encodes the tags with multiple items.
It happens with "Musician Credits" (TMCL) and "Involved People" (IPLS) tags as well.
Saving any tag, or just re-saving, in MusicBee will make these tags display as separate entries in Mp3tag.

[Exiled]

Ahh, Okay.

 Is there a way to activate splitting besides clicking on the "..." next to the field and updating?

[redwing]

Is there a way to activate splitting besides clicking on the "..." next to the field and updating?

If you enter "A; B" in artist tag box and save it, then MB will split the values.

[Exiled]

That would explain what is happening. All my music is already tagged using ";" It might just be better for me to split everything so I don't issues with things not being the same across the entire library.