Vorbis Metadata Support

[TheAlmightyGuru]

According to the official Vorbis metadata documentation, when multiple artists collaborate on a single song, you are encouraged to add multiple artist tags into the metadata. The example given on their web site (http://www.xiph.org/vorbis/doc/v-comment.html) says, if the artists are "Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins, and Sonny Stitt," the tagging software should write the following into the metadata:

ARTIST=Dizzy Gillespie
ARTIST=Sonny Rollins
ARTIST=Sonny Stitt

I have some songs in Vorbis format, and they are collaborations between multiple artists. The program I used to tag the music did so according to the Vorbis specifications--when I open the file in a hexeditor, I can see three ARTIST tags, each with one of the names I entered. However, when I played the song in Rockbox, I only the first artist was displayed.

After reading the manual, specifically the Audio and Metadata Formats section (http://download.rockbox.org/daily/manual/rockbox-sansaclipzip/rockbox-buildap2.html#x18-367000B), I found that this deviation is by design.

I understand that Rockbox has to work with limited memory and many different devices, so it can't support every possible option in every format, so I'm fine with a workaround. My question is, does the Rockbox team suggest a particular workaround, or do they know of a program which will automatically convert standard tags to rockbox-compliant tags? Thanks!

[saratoga]

I think the work around would be to only have one artist tag per file, or if you want multiple, put the most important one first. 

[TheAlmightyGuru]

Thanks for the reply. I've been playing with the program that I used to tag the Vorbis files (foobar2000), and there doesn't appear to be a way to tell it to combine the various artist flags into a single tag--which is understandable since it is the standard.

However, I did find that if I replace the semi-colon separator with a comma, they are combined as a single artist in the metadata. Unfortunately, this breaks foobar2000's built-in multi-tag support. Rather than ruin the tags in my library, I was thinking I could just alter the files on my DAP, but of course, I'm one of those people who listen to a lot of Broadway musicals, so I have a lot of tracks with multiple artists.

Does anyone know of a program that can quickly batch convert from the Vorbis standard to Rockbox's single artist tag variance? Thanks?

[TheAlmightyGuru]

I've been reading through the Rockbox metadata source code, and it looks like modifying it to concatenate multiple artists to make it more Vorbis-compliant would be a pretty trivial process.

Thus, where the Vorbis tags read:

ARTIST=Dizzy Gillespie
ARTIST=Sonny Rollins
ARTIST=Sonny Stitt

It would show up to users as:

ARTIST:Dizzy Gillespie; Sonny Rollins; Sonny Stitt

Although, from the looks of the code at the end of metadata_common.c, the code is purposely non-compliant. However, since a lot of the code is shared, I'm not sure if this is specifically directed toward ID3 tags and not Vorbis.

I would like to submit a patch to combine artists, but I want to know whether I should bother? Will the developers reject the patch?

[saratoga]

ARTIST:Dizzy Gillespie; Sonny Rollins; Sonny Stitt

Assuming that doesn't break anything, and you don't run out of space, thats probably ok.

Although, from the looks of the code at the end of metadata_common.c, the code is purposely non-compliant. However, since a lot of the code is shared, I'm not sure if this is specifically directed toward ID3 tags and not Vorbis.

Well yeah, we didn't design the entire operating system around some weird thing in Vorbis that no one uses.