How does MusicBee handle mp3 files with no 'title' tag?

[musicplayeralt]

(MusicBee version: 3.3.7491. PC: Win10.)

None of my files have 'title' tags defined. I noticed MusicBee is assigning them titles based on the filename, but butchering some of those values. This 'title' tag does not get saved outside of MusicBee, only within it. I'm wondering if this is the expected behavior, and if there's any settings where I can adjust how it's assigning this value.

(I realize there are options to auto-assign, etc. But I do not want to alter the files, I'm just trying to control this behavior that MusicBee has when assigning these values within the app.)

[Steven]

If there is no title tag, MB derives the title from the filename but doesnt update the file with the new value
If the filename contains " - " and the artist tag is also empty then MB splits the first part to the artist field and the second part to the title field.
That behavior is not configurable

[musicplayeralt]

Thank you.

[musicplayeralt]

Hope this post does not come across as negative in any way. Because all around, I am loving MusicBee. I'm so happy to have found a good alternative to Spotify.  I love the UI, and I am loving how customizable it all is. It also seems to be solidly implemented and I haven't noticed any bugs. It's awesome! however, this particular feature confuses me, and I wanted to share my user perspective in case it is somehow useful. Why is MusicBee assuming that if a filename has a hyphen in it, what is to the left is the artist and what is to the right is the real song title? This seems like it would be open to so many mistagged songs (as it does in my case). Many people might prefer the opposite format (title - artist), or another one entirely (album - title - atist, etc.), or have a mismatch of formats in their filenames. There's also plenty of songs in existence which simply have a hyphen in them as part of the song title, and it will split those too (this happens on several of my songs). This decision to split on the hyphen like that just seems like it's assuming a lot, and I'm having trouble understanding it. In all the other music organizers I've utilized, when there's a need to infer a title, the player just uses the entire filename (without filename extension). I haven't used a ton of other music players though, so this could be a trend I'm not aware of.

In my case, this feature really complicates my library. I'd say half of my songs have hyphens in the filename. Sometimes it's because they're formatted as <artist> - <title>, sometimes it's <title> - <artist>, sometimes the songname just has a hyphen, etc. What ends up happening is that I have hundreds upon hundreds of phantom artists that aren't really artists at all, but are just parts of filenames. this makes the ability to organize by artist unusable for the most part. I do make use of tags, but primarily 'album', 'album artist', and 'genre'. I've never needed to use the title tag in other players and it's never been a huge deal. i can go ahead and add title tags to my library so that it'll work with musicbee, and I'll end up doing that because I like this software a lot. But the design decision itself, I'm just having difficulty grasping. It seems like the safer bet would just be to always infer the title as the filename (without extension). Or, if it's going to split like that, to make it a customizable option, in case a user prefers a different format.

All that said, I want to give my props to MusicBee. You've created an awesome product. Actually, that is the reason I took the time to provide some feedback, in case my perspective is useful. (But if it is not useful that is OK. I could be lacking perspective here to understand why this decision is in place.) So again, I hope it doesn't come across as negative. In the meantime, I will be adding title tags to my files so that I can continue to use MusicBee.

[The Incredible Boom Boom]

The hyphen is the most common delimiter in music filenames and for the vast majority of people, probably not often present in the titles of their music collections, so Steven's decision makes sense to me. Think about it this way too: which method of using a music library manager - tagged music or untagged music - is "wrong" (or at least more difficult to accommodate?)

EDIT: While you're adding info to your files, if you want to display the filename for tracks that aren't yet tagged, you could create a Virtual Tag that contains...

Code

$IsNull(<Title>,<Filename>,<Title>)

[musicplayeralt]

Hi TheIncredibleBoom, thank you for the virtual tag example. In this case, i wasn't really concerned about displaying the filename, but rather ending up with lots of unintended artists.

Regardless - I have really started using MusicBee on the daily now. This is just a really great piece of software. I've just started working around this hyphen issue by renaming my files before I import them in to the library, or correcting the invalid artists values that got assigned. It's a bit of work, but totally worth it in my opinion to adjust to this player. I really appreciate this software - finally I have a decent music player for my music library, that means a lot to me (i searched so much for one). I really can't thank you guys enough for creating such a solid tool. It's so customizable, it looks nice, and most importantly, it works so well. I hope my perspective that i offered in this thread didn't come across as critical. P.S. - It's so cool to have skins to choose from. They look really nice too. Not overbearing, designed well, color options for everyone i think. I feel like a lot of thought and effort has gone in to the design of this player, from the top to the bottom. Thank you kindly for this awesome tool.