Error with multiple artists in mp3 files

[Sergio García]

I recently changed all my music files to have multiple artists separated with semicolons. Before, I had them separated with a comma and they were not recognized separately in the Artists list. Now with the semicolon the artists are separated wich was what I was looking but it doesn't happen with mp3 files, only with my FLAC files, as it can be seen in the screenshot below.

In mp3 files the artists of the same song appear together, but without the semicolon. What I am looking for is that each artist appears separately in the artists list and in the list of tracks the artists for the same song appear separated with the semicolon.

In the screenshots you can see that the album "Call Me If You Get Lost" by Tyler, The Creator (which I have in FLAC format), the artist "42 Dugg" appears in the artist list because he participates in one of the songs from the album. Within the album list, in this album the featured artists of each track appear separated with a semicolon after Tyler, The Creator. For example "Tyler, The Creator; 42 Dugg".
On the other hand, for the album "Live.Love.A $ AP" by A $ AP Rocky (which I have in mp3 format) in the artist list the artists appear together, that is, they do not differentiate them, and the semicolon does not even appear. Within this album, the artist of each track continues to appear the same as can be seen in the screenshot.

Does anybody know a possible solution for this or why this might happen?

[MotleyG]

In the files that are not separated, is the semicolon followed by a space? This is required for the separator function.

[Sergio García]

@MotleyG Yes, it is followed by a space. I just tried to delete that space and now works fine. My question now is why in the flac files there is no problem if there is a space followed by the semicolon? Because in my FLAC files i hve a sace followed by the semicolon to separate those artists. Thanks.

[MotleyG]

4 minutes ago, Sergio García said:

@MotleyG Yes, it is followed by a space. I just tried to delete that space and now works fine. My question now is why in the flac files there is no problem if there is a space followed by the semicolon? Because in my FLAC files i hve a sace followed by the semicolon to separate those artists. Thanks.

What happens if you edit again and put the space back? Perhaps the original tag “space” was not really an actual,space, but a similar character that would not be recognized as a “; “ but something else. Strange to me though that this works with the semicolon not followed by a space though.

[Sergio García]

Ok, I think the problem after some researching is ID3 (mp3 tags) does not support multiple instances of the same tag name (in this case the Artist tag). I use Musicbee to tag all my music and when I changed the commas for the semicolons the other day the program saved multiple instances for each artist also in the mp3 files, wich is not actually supported. So when I moved these files to Poweramp that's why it didn't recognize it well. If I edit the tags of those mp3 files in Poweramp writing a semicolon followed by a space, it does work as I mentioned before. It works because it saves the two artists, for example, "A$AP Rocky; Schoolboy Q" in the same artist tag and not in two separate artist tags., as can be seen in the screenshots below.
would there be any solution for this? Would it be possible to edit the mp3 files with mp3tag so that it saves them correctly? Right now I can't check it, I'll check it later.
The first screenshot shows the tags of a song saved with musicbee (with multiple instances for the same artist tag). The secind screenshot show how Poweramp saves it (with only one artist tag with the artists separated by a semicolon).

Thank you.

[andrewilley]

6 hours ago, MotleyG said:

In the files that are not separated, is the semicolon followed by a space? This is required for the separator function.

Space is not required, as whitespace padding either side of a separator symbol is ignored.

@Sergio García I suspect those separate TPE1 tags are actually a single TPE1 tag in the file, but with the contents broken down using null-bytes. This is a feature that was added in the ID3 v2.4 spec, but many v2.3 files seem to use them too. In MP3Tag, that encoding format is represented by \\ as the separator in the Artist field, and the actual file data looks like this (in Unicode):

Tag 'TPE1' (53 bytes):
0014: 01 ff fe 44 00 61 00 76 00 69 00 64 00 20 00 42 [...D.a.v.i.d. .B]
0024: 00 6f 00 77 00 69 00 65 00 00 00 ff fe 4d 00 69 [.o.w.i.e.....M.i]
0034: 00 63 00 6b 00 20 00 4a 00 61 00 67 00 67 00 65 [.c.k. .J.a.g.g.e]
0044: 00 72 00 00 00                                  [.r...]

 

Please ensure you are using the latest build of Poweramp (build 911) which now supports this for ID3 tags (it was previously only handled for Vorbis multiple ARTIST tags) and then do a FULL Rescan.

Andre

[MotleyG]

20 hours ago, andrewilley said:

Space is not required, as whitespace padding either side of a separator symbol is ignored.

This may be acceptable in PA. But most other apps that use a separator expect a space following the character to identify the function.