Tags saved in Picard do not appear in any other program [Windows]

Hello.

Quick question.

What would be the reason, and the solution, for why Picard multi-value tags simply do not appear anywhere else outside of Picard?

Not in Mp3tag, not in MusicBee, not in Foobar2000. It’s like they don’t exist.

But, in Picard, indeed multi-value performer tags are alive and well - in all my box sets and CDs.

Please see image for example.

How can I set up Picard to actually write multi-value tags that are readable outside of the program? I feel crippled by this and my ignorance :frowning:

Thank you everyone.

(Performer tags not showing up anywhere in any other program - only Picard)
PERFORMER ______ Henryk Szeryng;Pierre Fournier;Wilhelm Kempff

If you open such a file in Mp3tag and press ALT + T on it (showing all “Extended tags”), do you see a tag called INVOLVEDPEOPLE?

Are these M4A files?

No, nothing.
But I did find something out in my testing. This is so confusing. Here’s the data (see below).

What does it all mean?

Picard:

if I use the performer tag (lower case), then ONLY single fields/names are shown outside in MusicBee/Foobar.

if I use the performer tag (lower case), but have john smith;joe smith;brian smith; as the value, then NO tag info is seen in other programs. none.

MusicBee/Foobar:

if I use uppercase PERFORMER, in Picard – then the field value from Picard is shown in all programs.
including multi-value tag info.

Why?

Why does Picard show this as two different tags?

performer

and

PERFORMER

performer = can only take 1 single name/value, otherwise, appears empty in all other programs except Picard

PERFORMER = can be seen in all programs, multi-value, everything works flawlessly.

I am lost :slight_smile:

huh?

@newclassical: Are these M4A files?

No.

Normal MP3s. Some 192. Some 320.

Picard writes ID3 tags that foobar2000 does not read. Picard also writes M4A multi-value tags that foobar2000 does not read.

Since Picard by default is incompatible with my music library, I use my own taggerscripts to create proprietary performer fields:

performer gets written to the ID3 IPLS frame (involved people list, for ID3v2.3) or TMCL (musicians credits lists, for ID3v2.4).

In MusicBee you should see the values of these frames in the “Edit” dialog of a track when you click on the three dots button next to the artist name:

foobar2000 I am unsure what the current state is, but AFAIK it does not really support this. It kind of tries to read the data as “<MUSICIAN CREDITS>”, but fails to process the field properly (it is supposed to contain multiple values, where each odd value is an instrument and each even field an artist name). When I last tested this foobar2000 only showed the very first value (which usually is an instrument / vocal name or a generic “performer”). foobar2000 IMHO in general has a bit odd relationship to the ID3 standard :man_shrugging:

The internal tag name known to Picard is performer. This is what Picard interprets as representing the performers and knows how to map to different formats and to the MusicBrainz metadata. If you use PERFORMER you create a custom tag. In ID3 this will be stored as a custom text frame as TXXX:PERFORMER.

For ID3 you could also explicitly force Picard to write an arbitrary TXXX field with some scripting. E.g. this would create TXXX:performer with the values of performer.

$setmulti(_id3:TXXX:performer,%performer%)
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Wow. Thank you all for your help. It all makes sense now! Yes, I am using 2.3 tags btw.
Not motivated to migrate my entire life to 2.4 :stuck_out_tongue:

Hope you all have a great day.