Genre tagging: using available tag and order sorting

[alan9990]

I have a question re trying to make sense of my Genre tagging. I've read, re-read, and re-re-read post replies, and am going over and over the user guide... It takes me several readings to be able to sort everything into a meaningful understanding.

From the documentation it looks to me as if "Tag options" and "sortTags" is where I need to be looking? Hopefully an example will explain.

Due to inconsistencies between Musicbrainz, Discogs, CCDB lookups when ripping CDS, all this auto-tagging, combined with whatever artists and contributors upload to these various databases the below is an example of how the first entries in my Genre folder appear:

Code:

Acid Jazz
Acid Jazz|Afrobeat\Funk\Jazz\Latin Jazz
Acid Jazz|Contemporary R&B|Electronic|Soul
Acid Jazz|Disco|Funk|Jazz

and so on. The numerous combinations mean that the alphabetical display of unsorted genres runs into the thousands! And none of it due to any deliberate choices on my part. I understand that in the above categories, each 'sub' entry can represent just one track from an album - the remainder of which being tagged perhaps entirely as "Acid Jazz".

I'm trying to work out how to use the formatting options such that:

in the above list I'll take the third line

Code:

Acid Jazz|Contemporary R&B|Electronic|Soul

what I want to achieve is that this track will appear in each of those categories, but with just one entry in each (cross-referred if you will), so that "Acid Jazz", "Contemporary R&B", "Electronic" etc are displayed as just these single tag groups. Thus that line above, and which can represent just a single track, can exist as

Code:

Acid Jazz
Contemporary R&B
Electronic
Soul

The thinking behind this is simply that I can browse via "Genre", enter text, and have any track that might contain those terms neatly listed, as opposed to the current "dog's dinner" of arbitrary listing and special characters.

At this stage it's really not clear from the available documentation if this kind of filtering is possible on the "Genre" tag?

[simoncn]

To make this work correctly, you need to use a tagging program to split the combined tag:

GENRE=Acid Jazz|Contemporary R&B|Electronic|Soul

into separate tags:

GENRE=Acid Jazz
GENRE=Contemporary R&B
GENRE=Electronic
GENRE=Soul

Mp3tag can do this (see this page).

This isn't specific to the Genre tag. The above applies to all tags that contain multiple values separated by |.

Unlike using tagUpdate in MinimServer, this is a permanent change to the tags in your library.

[alan9990]

(15-03-2026 18:51)simoncn Wrote:  To make this work correctly, you need to use a tagging program to split the combined tag:

GENRE=Acid Jazz|Contemporary R&B|Electronic|Soul

into separate tags:

GENRE=Acid Jazz
GENRE=Contemporary R&B
GENRE=Electronic
GENRE=Soul

Mp3tag can do this (see this page).

This isn't specific to the Genre tag. The above applies to all tags that contain multiple values separated by |.

Unlike using tagUpdate in MinimServer, this is a permanent change to the tags in your library.

Aha! Once again very helpful. I've been using Kid3 tagger (Linux) for years. I've only ever been able to add single tags per field when tagging mp3 files.

However... (nothing is ever simple it seems) since I use EXT4 partitioning on my library it allows me to include "illegal" characters in filenames - I'm referring to Windows here. So I don't use NTFS or other more 'friendly' partition systems because I enjoy being able to have : or " or ? in my music file names - again, reflecting exactly what is on the release itself.

Since mp3tag is only available on Windows or Mac, I guess I'll need to look at a new file tagger - one that allows me to add multiple fields of the same value.

[iAdriaan]

My tool on Linux for tagging is QuidLibet. It includes a file tagged program called Ex Falso. It can do the thing you want to do.

[alan9990]

(19-03-2026 21:35)iAdriaan Wrote:  My tool on Linux for tagging is QuidLibet. It includes a file tagged program called Ex Falso. It can do the thing you want to do.

Thank you for this. I stuck with QuodLibet/Ex Falso for years. At the time I was very happy with it.

You raise an important subject - namely that what is perfectly okay for one tagger (multiple entries of a specific tag value) is not acceptable to another tagger.

Assuming that Minimserver respects whatever an "overall standard" might be as regards tagging, I suspect it may be time to change my preferred tagger of many years and replace it with one that is more fully compliant.

Thanks for the reminder!

[alan9990]

If it's at all helpful, I did a bit of digging around. Ended up finding this on a Sourceforge discussion:
>>

Multiple artists or genres: Both id3v2.3.0.txt (4.2) and id3v2.4.0-frames.txt (4.2) say that "there may only be one text information frame of its kind in an tag." In the case of IDv2.3 (TPE1), multiple artists shall be "seperated with the "/" character" and genres seem to be just concatenated (TCON has example "(51)(39)"). In the case of ID3v2.4 (4.2) "all text information frames supports multiple strings (..)". To create such a multi-string value, you have to separate the parts by pipe "|" symbols, e.g. "Bob Dylan|George Harrison|Jeff Lynne".
Multiple comments: Both id3v2.3.0.txt (4.2) and id3v2.4.0-frames.txt (4.10) says that "there may be more than one comment frame in each tag, but only one with the same language and content descriptor."
Therefore, multiple artists for ID3 tags should be possible using kid3-cli, and multiple comments with different descriptions can be hacked with the latest development version and kid3-cli -c "set comment 'Comment 1'" -c "set comment.description 'Description 1'" -c "set comment 'Comment 2'" -c "set comment.description 'Description 2'" /path/to/filename.mp3

Your example is with a FLAC file so all these lengthy explanations about ID3 tags may not be interesting for you. I just wrote it because I want Kid3 to handle different formats in a uniform way. I chose the pipe symbol to separate multiple strings because I think that it will normally not be used within the text of tags. In order to have a uniform handling for fields with multiple strings I suggest to split strings by the pipe symbol. Using

set artist 'Bob Dylan|George Harrison|Jeff Lynne'
for a FLAC file would result in the following Vorbis comment:

ARTIST=Bob Dylan
ARTIST=George Harrison
ARTIST=Jeff Lynne

<<

And which led me to wondering that a) well, if adding extra tags vs one extensive line is a breach of the standards then b) how is Minimserver processing tag information? Does it respect standards? In this case, it's not possible to have multiple tags for a single field.

Or, does Minimserver manage to extrapolate data and store in a database that's simply useful for browsing? And which is clearly a very good and valid thing. But how do I work out "where the line is/what is best practice" when it comes to tags with multiple values?

And I say this largely because it's been confirmed that Minimserver does not treat Genre tagging the way it does Album or Artist. Which to me makes it ever less clear exactly how I might proceed to create some 'definitive' version of my tags. And by this I mean either the actual tags added to the files, or via the very good remapping that Minimserver provides.

[simoncn]

MinimServer is fully compliant with the official ID3v2.3 and ID3v2.4 specifcations for how multiple tag values are handled.

In ID3v2.3, the text frames TOPE, TCOM, TPE1 and TEXT can have multiple values separated by slash (/). These correspond to the tag names ORIGINALARTIST, COMPOSER, ARTIST and LYRICIST. No other text frames supported by MinimServer can have multiple values and no other separator characters can be used. (The TOLY frame can have multiple values separated by slash but this tag is not supported by MinimServer.)

In ID3v2.4, all text frames can have multiple values separated by the NUL character (0x00). No other separator characters (including slash) can be used.

Using the pipe (|) symbol as a separator is not part of the ID3v2.3 or ID3v2.4 specifications and is a nonstandard extension used by some tagging programs (I'm not sure which ones).

I am not sure what you mean by "Minimserver does not treat Genre tagging the way it does Album or Artist." MinimServer treats Genre, Album and Artist exactly as described in the ID3v2.3 and ID3v2.4 specifications, so any differences are caused by differences in the specifications.

[alan9990]

This is brilliant. Thank you. I've been trying to use the NUL for my separation but haven't yet succeeded in working out how my system expects me to input it. I may get there.

My earlier comment about Genre tagging was based on my still incomplete knowledge of all these important details about spec compliance and such that you're kind enough to explain here.

If it's in any way helpful to know, I use ID3v2.4 on Tag 2 only. I see no use for Tag 1 since I will never allow Microsoft (Windows) anything other than read access to my audio files, and I don't see where else they could possibly serve. My library is FLAC and mp3, with a few MP4 files to be replaced. I don't touch WAV because AFAIK to this day the spec hasn't been made open, and I'm not aware of any software that can properly tag WAV files.

The more time I spend with Minimserver - specifically working out the best ways of indexing and displaying my library - the more and more I like it. And I happily accept that some of what I wish to achieve is simply correcting poor choices on my part e.g. having decided many years ago to tag GENRE in certain ways, at a time when a thing like standards compliance never entered my mind.

This forum is so helpful in getting the best from this software!

[simbun]

(22-03-2026 09:57)alan9990 Wrote:  If it's in any way helpful to know, I use ID3v2.4 on Tag 2 only. I see no use for Tag 1 since I will never allow Microsoft (Windows) anything other than read access to my audio files, and I don't see where else they could possibly serve. My library is FLAC and mp3

Have you tried Puddletag? To instruct Puddletag to create multivalued tags you need to delimit the list with '\\' e.g. Artist1\\Artist2. I've no personal experience with it but have seen it recommended on other forums.

I tested kid3-cli but I couldn't get it to produce compliant ID3v2.3 tags (it null separated the list), but ID3v2.4 and Vorbis (used in FLAC) were fine.

EDIT: It looks like puddletag will be able to "convert" your pipe delimited tags to proper multivalued too: https://docs.puddletag.net/source/functi...-separator

[alan9990]

So I now need to ask:

which is the correct character under ID3v2.4 that Minimserver accepts as NULL?

I read the documentation, and a Wiki page... but either it's '\0' or '\\' or (apparently) CTRL+@ or even CTRL+^ but these are for terminal.

Can anyone please tell me which character, or combination of characters (UTF-8) Minimserver will 'see' as a split?