Subsonic Forum

A big part of my files are tagged with multiple values for a field, like multiple artists on a track or multiple genres. How does (SubSonic) MusicCabinet handle this?

Unfortunately the specification isn't crystal clear on this (ID3v2.3 use /, in v2.4 use null) and the implementations have found another ways of doing it (usually by using ; ) (didn't like the '/' because of band names and titles sometimes contain it), ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID3#Multip ... _v2.3_tags

In practice the effect is that I open an album for an artist, and the majority of tracks are duets, but I can't find them on the album. I find them if I search and if I browse the collection.

Suggestion: a setting where you can type in the separators you would like to be used during indexing...

/SonixnSubs

PS: Addicted to MusicCabinet!!! :- )

I might not be clear to everyone what the consequences are, but let me explain what I see as the problem and the solution.
Consider the track “Kylie Minogue & Robbie Williams - Kids”.

Problem:
There will be a separate entry in the menu/gutter/margin labelled “Kylie Minogue & Robbie Williams”. If you end up with the listing of Kylie Minogue, you will not see this track. Nor if you list Mr Williams tracks.

Solution:
Just the opposite of what you see under “Problem”. The entry “Kylie Minogue & Robbie” wouldn’t be there (one could choose to implement it in such a way that it appears) and you would find the same track under both Minogue and Williams.
The track is tagged genres Electronic and Pop by Discoggs. Should it be in the category “Electronic and Pop”, Electronic or pop? For me it is logic if you select “pop” you get all tracks tagged as Pop regardless of what other genres they are also tagged with…

+1.
I use MediaMonkey to maintain my collection and my ID3 tags, and it also supports the use of multi-valued tags using a semicolon (;) as a separator. When my collection is imported into MusicCabinet, I face the same problems you're having. Multi-valued Genre fields are a big problem, because the entire tag becomes a single clickable value in the "genre cloud" diagram. I have a lot of tracks with Genre tags such as 'pop; female vocal; classical crossover'. MediaMonkey correctly processes that tag as having three separate values, but in MC's "genre cloud", only a single choice called "pop; female vocal; classical crossover" appears. Artist tags with multiple values are even worse. I'd sure love to see this corrected!