MusicBee formatting semicolons as colons

[Kvarkmeister]

Hello there,

I have been a moderately longtime user of MusicBee (over three years) and first of all I must say this freeware program has been a great deal for me as a music player and library. I wish to thank the developers of MusicBee and everyone involved with the project!

Onto the topic: ever since I first started using MusicBee, I noticed that other applications and programs see that semicolons in song file tags are displayed as colons instead of the aforementioned. Whereas MusicBee identifies the semicolons as intended, others do not. Does anyone know what might cause this, what could be a fix or have any comments on the matter? Any word is largely appreciated!

Matthias

[psychoadept]

Can you clarify what you mean by that?

MusicBee uses semicolons as a delimiter for multi-value tags (which is the standard for ID3v2.4 and commonly used the same way in other systems). The semicolons are not actually stored in the file, they are just representative.

[Kvarkmeister]

For example: I input two genres to a song's tag in MusicBee:

Heavy metal; Hard rock

I open the song in another player and the tags will be

Heavy metal:Hard rock

I hope this helps, sorry for being a bit vague.

[frankz]

For example: I input two genres to a song's tag in MusicBee:

Heavy metal; Hard rock

I open the song in another player and the tags will be

Heavy metal:Hard rock

I hope this helps, sorry for being a bit vague.

Yes, what he's saying is that when you do that in MusicBee, what you're really doing is entering two tags:
Genre: Heavy Metal
Genre: Hard Rock

MB displays those two tags as "Heavy Metal; Hard Rock"
The other player displays them as "Heavy Metal:Hard Rock"

But in your file, they are two separate Genre tags.  Different tools display those two separate tags together in the same field in different ways.

[Kwonnie]

To replace the delimiter for display only, use a virtual tag instead of the default tag containing this line

Code

$Replace(<Tag>,"; ",:)

It's the only workaround, though it's hacky and not very intuitive. But if you only need to reformat a few tags with semicolons it might do the trick for you.

[Zak]

... I must say this freeware program ...

*cough* Donationware *cough* 

[Kvarkmeister]

Thank you for your answers, everyone! Very helpful!