Multiple value delimiter

[simbun]

(14-03-2026 13:27)alan9990 Wrote:  from your above, you seem to be saying that if I use ; as the separator and despite I now see that whatever I subsequently do, only ONE artist can/should be displayed under Albumartist (so far so good), nevertheless the use of ; means that at least this string can be separated into two distinct Album artists, as opposed to | or / and which simply read as a single string.

My use of the semicolon was just to separate the artists, it's not a multiple value delimiter.

Each tagging application uses a character to visually separate the values in a multiple value tag:

• foobar2000, dbPoweramp and Picard use ;
• Mp3tag uses \\
  

None of these characters are stored in the tags, instead it's best to think of them being stored as:

Code:

ALBUMARTIST: Rosemary Clooney
ALBUMARTIST: Duke Ellington

Which is how they're actually stored in FLAC (using the Vorbis tagging standard).

In some servers/players you can configure a custom delimiter, but this is out of spec and not widely supported.

(14-03-2026 13:27)alan9990 Wrote:  The reason I ask is firstly to understand of course, but it then begs the question that since I am going to need to find a programmatic way of retagging (over 7000 albums) once I am settled on my preferences, in fact were I to simply omit any and all "double naming", the issue wouldn't even occur!

So I'd have lost the ability to link the album artist to one of the joint artists, but in any event I'd still be able to search and play the album... because it's a database.

If both artists are correctly (multiple values) tagged in the Artist tag, they'd still appear in the All Artists index and search, but every album they've appeared on would also be returned, not just the ones where they're the main artist (albumartist).