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ID3v2.3 multi-value field separator is always "/" #21
Description
For some libraries, users might decide to store ID3v2.3 tags for greater compatibility with older software (as opposed to the ID3v2.4 default).
Now ID3v2.4 allows storing multiple tags of the same name (for multi-value entries like artists, genres and so on) and ID3v2.3 traditionally used a slash "/" character (which brought us the "AC/DC problem").
People (and tagging software like MusicBrainz Picard) have started to support other separators to store multiple values on one ID3v2.3 field. Typical separators used today are the semicolon ;, the vertical bar |, a comma , the NULL character \0 and even character sequences like semicolon blank ; for better readability. The underlying Mutagen supports all of these by specifying v23_sep.
This is a missing feature in MediaFile (and beets) and I’d like to add it to the MediaFile class so it could also be supported via a beets config entry:
class MediaFile(object):
"""Represents a multimedia file on disk and provides access to its
metadata.
"""
def __init__(self, path, id3v23=False, id3v23_sep='/'):
"""Constructs a new `MediaFile` reflecting the file at path. May
throw `UnreadableFileError`.
By default, MP3 files are saved with ID3v2.4 tags. You can use
the older ID3v2.3 standard by specifying the `id3v23` option
and (optionally) the desired separator `id3v23_sep` for
multi-value fields (defaults to a slash character).
To use a NULL character as terminator, pass `id3v23_sep=None`.
"""Objections?
Would it need a u'/' instead?
N.B.: Making this a core config entry in beets should also help some plugins who currently specify their own separators.
Activity
sampsyo commentedon Oct 12, 2019
Sounds pretty reasonable to me, despite my general resistance to additional configuration options. Because Mutagen has first-class support, I can see this being effective. Here are a few miscellaneous comments:
Nonestand in for the null byte? It seems more predictable to let users specify'\0'if they want to use the null byte.Moonbase59 commentedon Oct 13, 2019
Yeah, multi-value tags in MP3s are very badly supported—everywhere I look. Maybe due to all these separator problems in ID3v2.3. ID3v2.4 was supposed to better this (and UTF-8), but it came too late so nobody cared too much anymore.
I’m also not too happy with
Nonefor the NULL byte, but that’s how Mutagen decided to do it.You’d think everybody uses ID3v2.4 now, but actually the overwhelming majority of the files out there are still ID3v2.3, for many different reasons. My own library of about 150k tracks also still has some 120k MP3s tagged using ID3v2.3, for compatibility reasons.
Would it break anything if we started out with the extra param in MediaFile and then later care about it in beets?
Add support for splitting of ID3v2.3 multi-value tags
Add support for splitting of ID3v2.3 multi-value tags
JuniorJPDJ commentedon May 11, 2021
It's the idea I would like to see as it's the most reasonable IMO.
Add support for splitting of ID3v2.3 multi-value tags for MP3ListDesc…
Add support for splitting of ID3v2.3 multi-value tags for MP3ListDesc…
Add support for splitting of ID3v2.3 multi-value tags for MP3ListDesc…
Add support for splitting of ID3v2.3 multi-value tags for MP3ListDesc…
Add support for splitting of ID3v2.3 multi-value tags for MP3ListDesc…