MP3 artist tag only includes first two artists

[Peter26J]

Hi guys
I just discovered that on MP3 files only the first two artists are taken from the artist tag.

I have separate ARTIST tags in the file:
ARTIST Gandalf
ARTIST Helmut Kappel
ARTIST Heinz Hummer
ARTIST Egon Gröger
ARTIST Robert Julian Horky
ARTIST Peter Aschenbrenner

But my mediaplayers (I tried several: BubbleUpnp, USBaudio, HEOS, Primare) only show Gandalf and Helmut Kappel.
I mostly deal with FLAC files and have never discovered this issue.

I use mp3tag for tagging and the MP3 file has ID3v1, ID3v2.3 and APEv2 tags.

Any idea what is wrong?

[simoncn]

MinimServer reads ID3v2 tags. It doesn't read ID3v1 tags or APEv2 tags. Are all the artists tagged using ID3v2 tags?

[Peter26J]

(27-05-2025 10:01)simoncn Wrote:  MinimServer reads ID3v2 tags. It doesn't read ID3v1 tags or APEv2 tags. Are all the artists tagged using ID3v2 tags?

I still have this problem. I converted the files of the album to only ID3v2.3 tags and Minimserver only takes the first two artists of the file. I see the same issue with another MP3 files, where it sometimes only sees artist 1 and 3.

See attachement

[simoncn]

Thanks for the screenshot confirming this.

There are two ways to tag an album with multiple artists in ID3v2.3.

1) The ID3v2.3 specification requires that each artist name is separated by a '/' character and that the list of artists is terminated by the first NUL character.

2) Some tagging programs including Mp3tag don't follow this specification. Instead, they uses NUL characters to separate the artist names. The NUL character is shown in the Mp3tag editor as \\.

MinimServer follows the ID3v2.3 specification, so any artist names following the first NUL character (shown as \\ by Mp3tag) are not read by MinimServer.

The simplest solution is to update the tags from ID3v2.3 to ID3v2.4. Mp3tag formats ID3v2.4 tags correctly according to the ID3v2.4 specification, so all ID3v2.4 tags are visible in MinimServer.

If for some reason you are unable to do this, an alternative solution is to separate the artist names with '/' characters.

[Peter26J]

Thanks. This also solves the same issue I had with DSF files.