MULTIFIELD_SEPARATOR Feature

[cmcginty]

There is a multifield feature in easy tag that writes multiple instances of the same tag if the field separator is found. Does anyone know what the point of this is? There are not a lot of players that support this, and it is not portable over other formats such as AAC, as far as I know.

The code in question is here:

https://github.com/stsquad/easytag/blob/master/src/flac_tag.c#L51

If there isn't a good use for this feature, it would be nice to remove it, or add an option to disable it. I'll look into submitting a patch for the later.

[jnreinwa]

Please remove this "feature"! I was searching for this "bug" destroying a lot of my tags for hours and could not believe that it was meant to be a feature. I haven't found a player using this multifield feature for something useful. But I use "-" quite often in my tags.
btw thanks for resurrecting EasyTAG. It's still the best tagger out there!

[cmcginty]

Ya, I agree. It works on some linux players, but it breaks all the tags on
my android phone.

On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 8:48 AM, jnreinwa <
reply@reply.github.com

wrote:

Please remove this "feature"! I was searching for this "bug" destroying a
lot of my tags for hours and could not believe that it was meant to be a
feature. I haven't found a player using this multifield feature for
something useful. But I use "-" quite often in my tags.
btw thanks for resurrecting EasyTAG. It's still the best tagger out there!

---

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
#19 (comment)

[jnreinwa]

Amarok is also a good example for a not working player. After changing tags of an album (tagged with an older version of EasyTAG some years ago) with the album tag "Some Album" and it's bonus cd having the album tag "Some Album - Bonus CD", Amarok database ignored the " - Bonus CD" and I ended up with all songs in one album, having two first tracks, two second tracks and so on...

[stsquad]

Hmm that does seem a little special. Does it affect Easy Tags parsing of existing tags or just writing new ones?

[jnreinwa]

Very simple: If a tag (written by another tagger) contains a " - " it is read and displayed by EasyTAG correctly. Nothing special. But if you now write the tags (after e.g. changing another tag), the " - " vanishes in all tags and you have multiple fields instead. I noticed this by using ogginfo on the files. A lot of players out there (e.g. Amarok) are using only the first tag when multiple tags are encountered. Reading the file again with EasyTAG the " - " is displayed again! You don't even see that you created a multiple field entry! That drove me crazy!

[stsquad]

I've just merged pull request #20 into the tree which I think gives the best of both worlds. I don't think I'll get a chance to test it for a few days but please feel free to report back if you can and we can close this issue.

[crater2150]

The pull request I sent makes it possible to disable the feature per field, instead of removing it. I'm using mpd, which actually reads all entries for a field, and for fields like "artist" it seems valid for me to have different entries (So i don't have "Foo" and "Foo feat. Bar" as separate artists in the library). As you can disable it for all fields, everyone should be happy.

[jnreinwa]

I like the solution and it also seems to work as expected! I just did some simple tests. Now I can use Easytag for all of my albums again without fixing the result using vorbiscomment! Thanks!
Let's hope that nobody wants to have multiple fields and dashes at the same time...
Nevertheless, I think we can close the issue.