Genre tagging - feature request

[HerrNilsson]

Hi Simon,
thank you for the minimserver as an alternative to the twonky. I like the intelligent browsing concept quite much. While browsing by genre I realized that the genre lable has not been parsed, e.g. "Rock,Pop" has not been interpreted to collect the following album for both genres, but the genre is treated as a extra one. My suggestion is to split the genre tag by ",", "/" and "&" and aggregate the music to all of them redundantly.

MinimServer has the potential to replace my twonky installation, which has to many unimportant feature instead doing the basics right (sort order by flac converted multiple CDs, etc.).

Thank you quite much.

Cheers,
Nils

[Raphaël Thévenin]

Hi

Wouldn't it be easier to simply use multiple "genre" tag in your files ? I dit it in my library and it works perfectly with minimserver.

RTh

[simoncn]

Hi Nils,
Thanks for the nice compliments about MinimServer!

The use of a separator for multiple values doesn't comply with tagging standards, and I'm not planning to support it in MinimServer. As RTh has said, MinimServer supports the standard way of tagging multiple genres on a track by using repeated tags for all the genres.

In Mp3tag it's very easy to create multiple tag values in the standard format by using the separator \\ within the genre field. Mp3tag also has a "split field by separator" action (see this page) which you can use to convert existing tags that contain a separator.

Simon

[HerrNilsson]

Thank you for your response. I certainly don't know the standard itself and its intention. I just didn't find the handling of genre tags, as provided e.g. by discogs or any other, by the different clients or upnp servers quite useful. I was just in favour of an intelligent genre handling: To find a title tagged as "Rock & Pop" also in the "Rock" section. I don't want to relabel thousands of titles, but I see your point. Besides I see a lot of potential your approach and by own experience I am in favour of using Java to obtain a robust solution. Thanks, Nils

[simoncn]

Hi Nils,
I understand your point, but I think this would lead to unexpected results for some tags. For example, the ID3v2 list of genre tags includes "R&B" and "Rock & Roll", both of which shouldn't be split at the "&" character. The same could apply to artist names, where you might want to split at "&" in some cases but not others.

Simon

[winxi]

(17-05-2012 14:53)simoncn Wrote:  The use of a separator for multiple values doesn't comply with tagging standards, and I'm not planning to support it in MinimServer. As RTh has said, MinimServer supports the standard way of tagging multiple genres on a track by using repeated tags for all the genres.

In Mp3tag it's very easy to create multiple tag values in the standard format by using the separator \\ within the genre field. Mp3tag also has a "split field by separator" action (see this page) which you can use to convert existing tags that contain a separator.

Hi, i don't get this to work. I use Mp3tag with the \\ separator to create multiple Genre tags, but MinimServer will always show just the first Genre tag in the Genre top level container. Am I missing some option?

[simoncn]

(18-08-2012 18:52)winxi Wrote:  Hi, i don't get this to work. I use Mp3tag with the \\ separator to create multiple Genre tags, but MinimServer will always show just the first Genre tag in the Genre top level container. Am I missing some option?

Thanks for sending the MP3 file. This seems to be a bug in Mp3tag with MP3 files containing ID3v2.3 tags. The multiple genres are concatenated into a single TCON frame, with null separators between them. In ID3v2.3, a null separator indicates the end of the frame value, which is why you are only seeing the first genre in MinimServer. This use of null separators would be valid for an ID3v2.4 TCON frame, but it isn't valid for an ID3v2.3 TCON frame.

You can work around this Mp3tag bug by saving the tag in ID3v2.4 format. In Tools->Options->Tags->Mpeg, select ID3v2.4 UTF-8 instead of ID3v2.3 UTF-16, then save the tag. The file should now work as expected.

[winxi]

(18-08-2012 20:44)simoncn Wrote:  You can work around this Mp3tag bug by saving the tag in ID3v2.4 format. In Tools->Options->Tags->Mpeg, select ID3v2.4 UTF-8 instead of ID3v2.3 UTF-16, then save the tag. The file should now work as expected.

Many thanks, Simon, this did the trick!

[winxi]

(18-08-2012 20:44)simoncn Wrote:  You can work around this Mp3tag bug by saving the tag in ID3v2.4 format. In Tools->Options->Tags->Mpeg, select ID3v2.4 UTF-8 instead of ID3v2.3 UTF-16, then save the tag. The file should now work as expected.

Sorry to bother you again about this. Saving as ID3v2.4 UTF-8 in Mp3tag seems to corrupt embedded album art. Do you know some other way to batch process a large number of files to repair the ID3v2.3 UTF-16 tag?

thanks, winxi

[simoncn]

(18-08-2012 21:32)winxi Wrote:  Sorry to bother you again about this. Saving as ID3v2.4 UTF-8 in Mp3tag seems to corrupt embedded album art. Do you know some other way to batch process a large number of files to repair the ID3v2.3 UTF-16 tag?

thanks, winxi

Can you upload a sample file that has this corruption, please? This might be a bug in MinimServer.

I don't know of any other solution to this Mp3tag problem for MP3 tags with multiple genres. Perhaps someone who has done this successfully will be able to suggest something.