PA doesn't parse multiple genres in m4a files

[GeilerHeinz]

It seems that PA doesn't parse multiple genres in m4a files. I have added multiple genres to different albums of m4a files in foobar2000. In the music library of foobar2000 the genres are shown correct. But in PA the same albums have no genres and are listed under "unknown genre". 

Regards 

[w3wilkes]

Do M4A files with a single genre show correctly? If not it sounds like Poweramp doesn't currently support genre in M4A files at all.

[andrewilley]

Works fine for me, editing the tag in TagScanner. I changed the Genre tag of an M4A file to show as "Rock ; Live" and it showed up correctly in both "Rock" and "Live" sections after a rescan.

Andre

[GeilerHeinz]

Thanks for testing, Andre. 

I tried re-tagging the two albums with foobar2000 once again and did a full rescan but it didn't work. While trying to re-tag the files with the Linux software exfalso I got an error message that the selected files don't support multiple entries in the field genre. 

M4a files with a single genre tag do show correctly in PA. 

Regards 

 

[andrewilley]

There don't need to be multiple tags - I'm not even sure if that is supported for M4A files by Poweramp anyway. You just need one Genre tag, with a semicolon separator character between each term.

Andre

[GeilerHeinz]

2 hours ago, andrewilley said:

[...] multiple tags - not sure if that is support for M4A by Poweramp anyway. [...] 

It seems like it's not supported for M4A files. 

Nevertheless I got it to work in PA with the // separator (with the disadvantage that in my foobar2000 library these concatenated entries now represent completely new genres (e.g. Electropop // Synth Pop)). But I think I can live with that. 

Thanks for your help. 

[Fitzian]

My library is predominantly M4A/alac files, and given that I separate genres with a comma, all that I needed to do in Poweramp was add the comma as a genre separator. It works fine!

[MotleyG]

1 hour ago, Fitzian said:

My library is predominantly M4A/alac files, and given that I separate genres with a comma, all that I needed to do in Poweramp was add the comma as a genre separator. It works fine!

Are you using m4a/ALAC for compatibility with iTunes? How do your genres look there? I didn't think it supported multiple genres but wish it would.

[Fitzian]

@MotleyG

I accrued the better part of my library while using a Mac/iTunes.

Since my 2007-era iMac died last year  I've been using a PC/Foobar... haven't opened iTunes more than a handful of times. Let alone tell it where my library resides 🤭.

And so I don't really know what my genres appear as or sort as in iTunes, tbh. At some point I just started listing genres an album belonged to, never with any real thought of if it was "supported" or not in iTunes. Now that I have my library on HDDs and my DAPs sd cards, the thought of going in and adding "//" instead of "," is much less preferable to how Poweramp now just lets me choose which separator i prefer !

[MotleyG]

30 minutes ago, Fitzian said:

@MotleyG

I accrued the better part of my library while using a Mac/iTunes.

Since my 2007-era iMac died last year  I've been using a PC/Foobar... haven't opened iTunes more than a handful of times. Let alone tell it where my library resides 🤭.

And so I don't really know what my genres appear as or sort as in iTunes, tbh. At some point I just started listing genres an album belonged to, never with any real thought of if it was "supported" or not in iTunes. Now that I have my library on HDDs and my DAPs sd cards, the thought of going in and adding "//" instead of "," is much less preferable to how Poweramp now just lets me choose which separator i prefer !

@Fitzian 👍 I thought you had a secret that would have made my Millenia!