Musicbee appends Bands to Album Artists?

[techvslife]

I have various music files (m4a) and according to mp3tag (and other programs) there is only one identical "Album Artist" on each of them: "Various Artists."
MusicBee however shows "Album Artist" as whatever is under the "Band" tag AND under "Album Artist." (It concatenates Band and Album Artist, and that is what it shows as Album Artist.)
Is this a bug? or have I overlooked a setting somewhere?
Thank you.

p.s. It looks like the program gets confused if tags are edited in Picard (Mutagen) even when I strip out all the multiple atom tags for flat tags (values on one line, each separated by a semi-colon). Oddly, MusicBee also creates multiple atom tags for Artist, which I wasn't expecting since it doesn't allow them for Genre. It could be I have to keep track of which tags are safe for same-tag multiple atoms in MusicBee and which in Picard, but they also might have different ways of doing same-tag multiple atoms.

[hiccup]

Disclosure: I only speed-read briefly, but is this pertaining exclusively to m4a (apple stuff) files?
If so, it might be a good idea to mention that in the title.
And also, this should probably be in 'Questions' and not in 'General Discussions'?

[techvslife]

Thanks, so far only m4a -- but I found a solution! When MusicBee does NOT recognize a tag, such as Band, the solution is to Add the tag as a new tag in Options (Define tag) *AND* then define that same new tag as a custom tag. With that, the Album Artist tag correctly appeared on all the files (without making any edits to the files).  --this is possibly a bug in how musicbee deals with unknown tags, or maybe just undefined behavior.

[hiccup]

Great. if I recall correctly, a 'band' tag also had some ambiguous and unclear purpose in early MP3 tagging protocols. Not sure though.

If this is something that might be an issue still for m4a files, perhaps MB could handle it differently?
But then again, I don't think it has been reported before, and you have found a solution.
So it perhaps doesn't need any further action or consideration.

Unless Picard and Mp3tag are indeed handling this differently from MusicBee these days.

[techvslife]

Yes, I think there is some issue with how MusicBee handles tags unknown to it that have been written by other programs such as Picard. Maybe it skipped over the unknown "band" tag name and appended it to the preceding tag (as "band" seems to follow "Album Artist" in the file), or maybe MusicBee has some ad hoc logic for band. If I have time, I'll do more testing and report it as a bug. Might be confined to m4a files. (--But defining all tags in MusicBee does seem to resolve this issue.)