If you are talking about id3v2.3 tags, the "standard" does say that "/" should be used to separate values (applies to several fields).
eg, the standard says: TPE1 The 'Lead artist(s)/Lead performer(s)/Soloist(s)/Performing group' is used for the main artist(s). They are seperated with the "/" character. However, not many applications obey that rule. I used to use ";" as a separator too, but it's naff if you load mp3 files into iTunes for example, as you get all unique artist tag strings in the artist filter list. I don't think it understands "/" either. id3v2.3 doesn't officially allow multiple TPE1 tags, but there is a hack that works in many apps. Each tag value is ended with a <null> character, but also has a length. Some apps are written to use <null> as a delimiter, and read up to the length of the value string. Eg. in mp3tag "\\" is used to separate a string into several tag name/value pairs. For id3v2.3, ARTIST would then be entered as a single TPE1 frame with <null> characters in the string. i.e. You can enter ARTIST=A\\B\\C, which is equivalent to ARITST=A, ARTIST=B, ARTIST=C, and would be stored TPE1=A<null>B<null>C<null>. Some apps understand this (I know that Mp3Tag, Foobar and SqueezeCenter do), and thus you get three proper distinct artists instead of one string containing all artists. Apps that don't understand this (i.e. don't interpret the length) just read up to the first <null>", so the artist will be reported as A. This looks better (if you add the primary contributing artist first) than a list of artists. However, if you use such an app to edit tags for the file, they re-write all tags and will thus lose the extra artist information. So, all in all, id3v2.3 is rubbish and you're better off with FLAC files with FLAC tags, which does allow multiple artists :-) -- Philip Meyer ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Philip Meyer's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=95 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=54410 _______________________________________________ ripping mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/ripping
