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Topic: Music players and the "grouping" tag (Read 4431 times) previous topic - next topic
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Music players and the "grouping" tag

(Wasn't sure where to post this: hopefully it's okay here)

When tagging my audio files I can often run up against albums that have some sort of sub-sections (e.g. CDs with movements spanning multiple tracks, or albums that compile two other albums). The only satisfactory way I can see to deal with this is to use the "Grouping" tag, and yet as far as I can tell my favoured music player (Amarok) refuses to have anything to do with this tag.

Can anyone recommend other players that play nicely with Grouping? Ideally I'm looking for something which will allow me to display the "now playing" information in the format

Grouping
Title
Artist

(e.g.
Iohargh
RDD-7
Mick Barr)

or similar, but just working out which players will acknowledge the existence of the tag would be a good start.

Anyone?

Music players and the "grouping" tag

Reply #1 –
foobar2000 allows you to display group headers in a playlist, based on whatever tag you specify. Maybe that's not exactly what you mean, though.

Of course, a prerequisite for using foobar is that you let go of the vague concept of "now playing"

Music players and the "grouping" tag

Reply #2 –
Quote from: dhromed on
Of course, a prerequisite for using foobar is that you let go of the vague concept of "now playing"


Not sure I follow. Is foobar going to fracture my laughable human psyche and allow me to realise that all moments in sonic history can be experienced simultaneously?

Oh and suggestions for either Windows or Linux players welcome.

Music players and the "grouping" tag

Reply #3 –
If by "grouping" tag, you're referring to the TIT1 frame in id3v2.3, then iTunes, WMP, foobar and MusicBee are some of the players I can think of off the top of my head that recognize this tag. I think the problem you'll face is not so much finding a player that recognizes this tag but one that allows you to use it as you wish (for example, WMP writes sub-genres to this frame if memory serves me correctly). I know foobar will allow you to use it however you wish, and possibly MusicBee as well.

What I'd do is find a player you like and do some research as to whether it supports the TIT1 frame and whether it has appropriated it for a particular use. My advice, however, is to just add your "grouping" info to the title tag to ensure you'll see it regardless of what player you use.

Music players and the "grouping" tag

Reply #4 –
Quote from: BenB on
If by "grouping" tag, you're referring to the TIT1 frame in id3v2.3, then iTunes, WMP, foobar and MusicBee are some of the players I can think of off the top of my head that recognize this tag. I think the problem you'll face is not so much finding a player that recognizes this tag but one that allows you to use it as you wish (for example, WMP writes sub-genres to this frame if memory serves me correctly). I know foobar will allow you to use it however you wish, and possibly MusicBee as well.


Yeah, that's the tag I'm talking about. foobar looks like it'll do the job nicely; can't believe I've never tried it before! I take it from your post that foobar isn't going to try to rewrite my tags. Is that right? I have a terror of installing software that might start writing stuff drawn from some database over my meticulously filled out tags. 

Quote from: BenB link=msg=0 date=
What I'd do is find a player you like and do some research as to whether it supports the TIT1 frame and whether it has appropriated it for a particular use. My advice, however, is to just add your "grouping" info to the title tag to ensure you'll see it regardless of what player you use.


Take, for example, this album. The grouping tag for the first four tracks would read "The Seventeenth Collection for Two Kotos and Sho". If I was to implement the system you suggest then the track title for track 19 would be "The Eighteenth Collection for Violin, Two Kotos and Sho: Pattern C". This is obviously pretty long. My portable player is a Sansa Clip Zip, which has about a 1 inch square screen, making such long titles impractical. So really I am looking for something that would allow me to display the grouping/TIT1 tag of the track now playing on its own line. (Rockbox allows me to do this on the Clip Zip). foobar should be flexible enough to allow me to do that, right?

Music players and the "grouping" tag

Reply #5 –
Quote from: BenB on
My advice, however, is to just add your "grouping" info to the title tag to ensure you'll see it regardless of what player you use.


For myself, I leave the title pretty clean, but for multi-disc sets I will often get creative with the idea of "Album".

So for example if there's a box set containing separate "albums" as far as the label and online DBs are concerned, but I want to treat the whole set as a single collection to be listened to as a whole, then I'll make it all one "album" as far as tagging goes.

If the total number of tracks is <100 I'll also usually number them that way, ignoring the now-mostly-irrelevant concept of physical media.

I will however also keep the original album string in a custom tag for backup purposes, still have disc numbers etc, but as far as my player is concerned I've just got one huge album with a sequence of dozens of tracks.

I see the grouping tag as an extension of genre myself - use it for multi-valued per-track sub-genre data, leaving the usual Genre tag as a single-valued "meta" attribute of the artist.

Music players and the "grouping" tag

Reply #6 –
Quote from: convergent on
Not sure I follow. Is foobar going to fracture my laughable human psyche and allow me to realise that all moments in sonic history can be experienced simultaneously?


Yes. Peter's pretty good like that.