use single "\" or ";" rather than "\\" to separate artists

[spon]

unrelated question - does anyone know why Advanced Search and Replace won't allow copying to Artists? You can copy from but not to. It's missing from the picklist.

https://ibb.co/mBjxnwb

[hiccup]

That's because 'artists' isn't an actual tag.
It's a virtual (dynamic) tag that MusicBee populates depending on the presence and contents of 'display artist', 'artist', 'performer', etc.

[hiccup]

Your description and analysis is probably correct.
Except that I don't suspect MusicBee is doing something wrong regarding the delimiter it uses for id3v2.3
I don't think a delimiter for that was an official and clearly defined part of the id3v2.3 specs some 25 years ago.
It may even have been years later before somebody thought to put multiple values into a tag.

That issue was acknowledged and fixed in id3v2.4 though, so that's a good reason to use 2.4.

It's very strange that Emby/FFprobe still don't support id3v2.4.
What's taking them 21 years?
Or are they mainly interested in video, and is audio just something that happens to be in their fishing nets sometimes?

[spon]

Yeah, Emby is definitely more focused on video and audio is just sort of along for the ride. The issue itself is with ffprobe but after reason some bug reports it doesn't seem like something they are planning to correct anytime soon. They do claim support for v.24, except as it relates to multiple artists and null separators. Emby dev said they will put it on their list to come up with a fix for it but they don't plan to move away from ffprobe, in general.

The Artists (virtual) tag is interesting b/c ffprobe DOES read from that tag correctly. I just can't set it in MB. Right now I'm using Tag Scanner to Picard to set Artists but it's manual process so I'm still looking for something a little more automated.

[hiccup]

The Artists (virtual) tag is interesting b/c ffprobe DOES read from that tag correctly.

'artists' is not an 'official' id3 tag, but you can create a custom tag for it that should be compatible with Picard et al.
It will then read/write 'TXXX/artists' for id3, which I think should be identical to how Picard does it. (I don't know about TagScanner)

Note that while you can use 'artists' as the identifier when creating the custom tag, for the display name you'll have to choose something else because otherwise it would conflict with MB's internal use of 'artists'.

[spon]

The Artists (virtual) tag is interesting b/c ffprobe DOES read from that tag correctly.

'artists' is not an 'official' id3 tag, but you can create a custom tag for it that should be compatible with Picard et al.
It will then read/write 'TXXX/artists' for id3, which I think should be identical to how Picard does it. (I don't know about TagScanner)

Note that while you can use 'artists' as the identifier when creating the custom tag, for the display name you'll have to choose something else because otherwise it would conflict with MB's internal use of 'artists'.

Thanks, it sounds like this might be a good work around for me. Is there a guide you could point me to? I do see the custom tag options in Preferences, but I'm not familiar with how I would go about using it for this purpose. Thanks again man. Really appreciate it.

[spon]

no need for any further response. I've figured out what to do to work around my problem. Thanks for the help everyone.

[phred]

I've figured out what to do to work around my problem.

It would be helpful for anyone else experiencing something similar if you posted what you did to resolve the issue.

[spon]

I've figured out what to do to work around my problem.

It would be helpful for anyone else experiencing something similar if you posted what you did to resolve the issue.

Sure. The first thing I did was set up a custom tag using Artists as the identifier (display name I called Aritsts-multi). This tag is readable by ffprobe/Emby and take precedence over the Artist tag. Then I set up a preset in Advanced Search & Replace to be automatically applied which copies the artist names from the Artist (displayed) tag into the new custom Artists tag. So far, so good!