Feature request: Optional tag delimiters

[AMP]

After your test I did some more digging and think I've figured out the problem. First off, it would appear that the documentation that I was reading on how JRiver was interpreting and writing tags was incorrect (it was a post on their forum).

All of my files are AIFF and are tagged with ID3v2.4. When JRiver writes out the tags it places the separate values into a TXXX frame with the description "Soloists" and each value separated by a NULL character.

Not sure if this was correct behavior I looked at the ID3v2.4 spec on id3.org and found that the language is somewhat ambiguous. For "T..." frames the null separator is correct, but depending on how the spec is read that either does or does not apply to TXXX frames. What is clear is that the descriptor "Solosists" cannot be repeated in a single tag.

Quote:There may be more than one
"TXXX" frame in each tag, but only one with the same description.

So, it would appear that multiple TXXX frames for multiple values won't work and based on looking at the behavior of many tagging programs none take this approach...

I converted the AIFF to an mp3 with dbpoweramp and looked at the file in dbpoweramp, metadatics (mac), kid3 (mac), mp3tag, JRiver, and Media Rage. All showed the file as having id3v2.3 tags and all showed the string for the soloists TXXX frame as "soloist 1/soloist 2"

I changed the tag format to ID3v2.4 in mp2tag and re-wrote it and the value of the TXXX frame changed to "Soloist 1(NULL)Soloist 2". In fact, with every piece of tagging software that I have the Soloists frame was written out using the NULL character as the delimiter.

I've seen it mentioned elsewhere on this forum that your interpretation of the standard is that the NULL delimiter doesn't apply to TXXX frames, and having read the spec I can see that interpretation. Unfortunately, it would appear that few others are reading it that way and instead are creating multiple-entry TXXX frames using the null character. I've yet to find a program which will write a multiple-value tag out as multiple TXXX frames with the same descriptor.