Multiple value artist mp4 (m4a) tag in picard and mp3tag not visible in MusicBee

[techvslife]

I have an mp4 (m4a) music file. Picard will tag the Artist field to be multiple value (several artists), each separated by semi-colons -- when you edit the tag in Picard, each artist appears on separate lines, so the semi-colon is indicating a separate Artist tag. In mp3tag, that music file is confirmed to have multiple artist tag values.

In musicbee, the artist tag for that music file appears blank (null).

Has anyone encountered this? I can manually "solve" the problem by editing the Artist field in Picard to eliminate the artists on separate lines, and put all the artists on one line, also separated by a semi-colon (then it appears in MusicBee), but I was hoping for a way not to have to do that.  Thank you.

This may (or may not) be relevant -- it appears mp3tag made special changes to read Picard's multi-value tags (in mp4 files):
https://community.mp3tag.de/t/multi-value-mp4-fields-written-by-musicbrainz-picard-are-not-displayed/56138/14

There is also this ticket:
https://tickets.metabrainz.org/browse/PICARD-376

p.s. Perhaps it's best to request an option to read and convert on open these picard-style (mp3tag style) multi-tags to the way MusicBee does multiple value tagging on mp4 (m4a) files -- MusicBee seems not to create multiple identical tags in the case of mp4 (m4a) files. --The MusicBee way has the advantage of showing all values of the multi-tag in Apple iTunes; the Picard way does not (shows only the first value or artist).

[hiccup]

I believe a solution has been presented; using $set instead of $setmulti in the artist/artists script you are using in Picard?
You also mentioned ending up with some duplicate artists?
Those can be filtered out by using $unique

[techvslife]

@hiccup
That's helpful, but still would be a time-saver if MusicBee could read these alternative mp4 format tags without first having to edit and save them in Picard.

[hiccup]

@hiccup
That's helpful, but still would be a time-saver if MusicBee could read these alternative mp4 format tags without first having to edit and save them in Picard.

In that case you could create a wishlist topic on this.
(I have no strong opinion on it, since I don't use m4a or any other apple formats, except for some occasional testing)

[techvslife]

Thanks, the wishlist topic for this is here:
https://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=39382