I need help with semicolons

[Ghost000009]

Hello, I'm new to Poweramp, I moved all my music from musicbee to the SD card in my phone. When I go to the albums tab or artists this is what I see. The songs on the artist with semicolons have multiple artists Tagged, and they are separated by a semicolon, which is the way that musicbee tagged my music, but on Poweramp I get the first artist and then a bunch of semicolons depending on how many artists are tagged. Is there a way to solve this? I already put semicolon as a symbol to split multiple artists and did a full rescan but nothing changed.

[andrewilley]

Odd. A Full Rescan after enabling semicolon as the separator ought to fix that.

Could you check the actual contents of the tags - long-press on a song and show Info/Tags. Perhaps they are saved as null-separated items for ID3 tags, or multiple ARTIST tags in FLAC/Vorbis, but also contain real semicolons as actual characters? I can't see why they would keep adding to make new extended Artist names though.

Uploading a couple of sample files for checking might be helpful.

Andre

[Ghost000009]

@andrewilley This is how the tags on one of the songs looks on Poweramp vs "star music tag editor" which is the first tag editor I found on the play store. I will attach one of the songs (it's a different one than the one of the photo since that one exceeds file size limit).

Verbal Intercourse (feat. Ghostface Killah & Nas)

[Ghost000009]

7 minutes ago, Ghost000009 said:

@andrewilley This is how the tags on one of the songs looks on Poweramp vs "star music tag editor" which is the first tag editor I found on the play store. I will attach one of the songs (it's a different one than the one of the photo since that one exceeds file size limit).

Verbal Intercourse (feat. Ghostface Killah & Nas) 8.25 MB · 0 downloads

Just in case this is how I put semicolon as a symbol to split artists, maybe I dit it wrong 

[andrewilley]

In that file, the text is encoded using the Unicode UTF-16 character set, which uses two bytes per character. At the start of each text string is a "byte order mark" - hex FEFF - to indicate the coding order of the content that follows. Each item in the tag is also separated by two null bytes - hex 0000 - but as there isn't then another BOM for the next part of the string, PA doesn't seem to know what to do with the rest of the text.

Until @maxmp gets a chance to write some code to allow for this variance, re-saving the file with no other changes in a tag editor like MP3Tag will fix the issue by correcting any such text tags, and the file should then work fine.

Original content of the TPE1 (Artist) tag. Note: this uses two bytes per each text character:

  | Artist = Raekwon/Ghostface Killah/Nas
  | - Tag 'TPE1' (59 bytes):
  |     01 ff fe 52 00 61 00 65 00 6b 00 77 00 6f 00 6e [...R.a.e.k.w.o.n]
  |     00 00 00 47 00 68 00 6f 00 73 00 74 00 66 00 61 [...G.h.o.s.t.f.a]
  |     00 63 00 65 00 20 00 4b 00 69 00 6c 00 6c 00 61 [.c.e. .K.i.l.l.a]
  |     00 68 00 00 00 4e 00 61 00 73 00                [.h...N.a.s.]

Re-saved version. Note the additional 'ff fe' after each '00 00' null pair separator:

  | Artist = Raekwon/Ghostface Killah/Nas
  | - Tag 'TPE1' (65 bytes):
  |     01 ff fe 52 00 61 00 65 00 6b 00 77 00 6f 00 6e [...R.a.e.k.w.o.n]
  |     00 00 00 ff fe 47 00 68 00 6f 00 73 00 74 00 66 [.....G.h.o.s.t.f]
  |     00 61 00 63 00 65 00 20 00 4b 00 69 00 6c 00 6c [.a.c.e. .K.i.l.l]
  |     00 61 00 68 00 00 00 ff fe 4e 00 61 00 73 00 00 [.a.h.....N.a.s..]
  |     00                                              [.]

Andre

[Ghost000009]

@andrewilley That issue is fixed now thanks. I have another thing, that is not really an issue but for QoL. Is there a way to display the first artist on a collaboration album between two artists? So let's say I have the album Alfredo by Freddie Gibbs and The Alchemist, it is displayed in Poweramp as "Alfredo - Freddie Gibbs; The Alchemist". Can I make it so it shows only Freddie Gibbs? 

[andrewilley]

No, not at present, the Artist display is always shown in full. There has been some talk of developing user-customisable display fields - so you could set the top and/or bottom lines to whatever content you want - but that's still a bit of a way off.

Andre