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Topic: Foobar change ALBUM ARTIST to ALBUMARTIST (Read 1699 times) previous topic - next topic
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Foobar change ALBUM ARTIST to ALBUMARTIST

Hi! I use the field ALBUM ARTIST to albums with several artist but when I scan the ReplayGain of my FLAC files Foobar change the metadata of ALBUM ARTIST to ALBUMARTIST field.
Why?

Before scan ReplayGain


After scan ReplayGain

Re: Foobar change ALBUM ARTIST to ALBUMARTIST

Reply #1 –
It is done deliberately to be compatible with software that doesn't read ALBUM ARTIST with space. Foobar2000 didn't do that in old days, but has made the switch ... I don't know when. You find it under Preferences -> Advanced, type albumartist into the filter on top. There you can choose to use ALBUM ARTIST, TOTALTRACKS and TOTALDISCS. But I'd keep it as default.

foobar2000 does some so-called "remappings". Have you seen the Vorbis comment field <ORGANIZATION>? That is where fb2k puts what to user is shown as PUBLISHER because, well, publisher or label is what has become commonplace to show to users. For ID3 there are a ton of them.

Re: Foobar change ALBUM ARTIST to ALBUMARTIST

Reply #2 –
Thanks for the answer and explanation. Always I use the field ALBUMARTIST but I read the field "ALBUM ARTIST" is used for compilations with various artist (what I need) and "ALBUMARTIST" for band or something like that.
Just I want to fill the metadata fields correctly but seems there is not a (100%) universal way.

Re: Foobar change ALBUM ARTIST to ALBUMARTIST

Reply #3 –
No, there isn't one universal way. The lossless formats use tagging schemes that are "too free-form" for that.

For Vorbis (used in FLAC): At https://xiph.org/vorbis/doc/v-comment.html there is "a proposed, minimal list of standard field names with a description of intended use" (note the vague wording; no SHOULD or MUST here). Like ID3 they try to reserve DATE for when it was recorded, not when it was released (so, no reason for all tracks on an album to share it) - but because this is a proposal, we don't have a ton of applications breaking a specification. You see ORGANIZATION (that shows up to you as PUBLISHER). You see DESCRIPTION (but, in actual tagged files you do much more often see COMMENT).

For ID3, foobar2000 does much more remappings than for Vorbis comments (that is likely due to ID3 being more prescriptive). In particular, do not try to use ALBUM ARTIST SORT or ALBUM SORT with ID3 ... well foobar2000 will read them, but once you modify any tag (not necessarily these!), fb2k will remove the spaces in the field names.

Re: Foobar change ALBUM ARTIST to ALBUMARTIST

Reply #4 –
mp3tag writes ALBUMARTIST with no spaces too.

If you make a copy of any flac and wipe all tags, manually use the Album Artist field on the left hand pane here...



Now open the extended tags dialog...



How you ended up with spaces originally, only you know. Perhaps trust the developers of these applications to know what they're doing. They've been at it for a very long time.

Re: Foobar change ALBUM ARTIST to ALBUMARTIST

Reply #5 –
Quote from: marc2k3 on
How you ended up with spaces originally, only you know. Perhaps trust the developers of these applications to know what they're doing. They've been at it for a very long time.
Oh gimme a break - no, even something as big and well-established as ffmpeg is not to be trusted on the matter:
ffmpeg -i wavpackfile.wv flacfile.flac
will transfer tags, and will transfer ALBUM ARTIST with space to flacfile.flac if present in the WavPack file. Why should ALBUM ARTIST be present in the WavPack file? Because the space is standard in APEv2.
(Not recommended in view of yesterday's bug report - ffmpeg may botch up even the audio in .wv files. So much for trusting the devs to know what they are doing.)

Also, this comparison of 2013 indicates that Winamp would enforce ALBUM ARTIST. It seems that foobar2000 made the change with 1.1.8, that is eleven years ago. I have many albums ripped before that.

Re: Foobar change ALBUM ARTIST to ALBUMARTIST

Reply #6 –
I've never understood why anyone would use ffmpeg for encoding anything. Maybe on platforms where native encoders aren't available. :/

And people posting screenshots of mp3tag and using foobar2000 are probably not the command line junky you might be. I certainly never do it.

edit: anyway, to be absolutely clear, don't use mp3tag screenshots to grumble about foobar2000 behaviour which is exactly the same.

Re: Foobar change ALBUM ARTIST to ALBUMARTIST

Reply #7 –
I remember having this battle many years ago coming from winamp, I was very annoyed that foobar silently changed the tags. The answer was to just never edit tags with foobar because it has too many unpredictable behaviours.

Re: Foobar change ALBUM ARTIST to ALBUMARTIST

Reply #8 –
Quote from: marc2k3 on
I've never understood why anyone would use ffmpeg for encoding anything.
I don't even want to know how many audio converters are doing that behind the user's back.

Which is to say that I agree on not using it for encoding if it can be avoided - and that no, just because they are developing a long-running ubiquitous application, it doesn't mean they can be trusted to do the right thing!
There are good reasons not to use ffmpeg, although the most glaring example is "decoding" rather than encoding: converting to .wav or .aiff, ffmpeg will produce 16 bits unless told otherwise. Lossy for > 16 bits, and for no good reason other than easy to remember for devs ...
... but ffmpeg transfers tags! and so I guess lazy converter developers will just use that too.


(That said, there is one format where ffmpeg is better than the native: TTA, because tta.exe refuses several kinds of .wav files, tta.exe  doesn't know that .wav sample count is unsigned integer - and also ffmpeg uses the TTA code and produces bit-identical encodes until end of audio and beginning of tags.  But then, is there any reason to encode to TTA? Except ... well there is one particular collection out there which insists on TTA - as per the TOS I won't link to it.)