Many of my audio tracks are sets including multiple tunes. I just switched from Windows Media Player to MC, and in WMP I used semicolons to separate the composer of each tune in a set, e.g.
trad; trad; David Smith; trad
This way I could associate each tune in the set with its composer, yet I could easily search for all tracks containing tunes composed by a particular person. But after importing my data into an MC library (32.0.6, Windows) examples such as this in the Composer field are now displayed as either:
trad; David Smith
or more often
trad/David Smith
I.e., duplicate names have usually been discarded so the embedded information is lost, and I don't understand why the semicolon is sometimes (but not always) converted to a slash.
Actually, in some cases it seems like the imported data have NOT discarded the duplicate names, e.g. I found cases where
David Smith; trad; trad
was imported as
David Smith / trad / trad
without deleting the duplicate. I can’t see any rhyme or reason for these importing differences.
This is all a bummer because I've compiled these data from thousands of album covers and many other sources over the past 20 years, so there is no way I can easily recreate this.
Questions:
1) Are my original data permanently lost upon import, or is there a way to edit the MC metadata formatting to restore the conventions I previously used in WMP?
2) If my original data have been retained and I can restore the WMP formatting protocols, what are the steps? And
3) If the metadata formatting is editable, can those conventions be edited for only one field (or “tag” in MC terminology?), or will any change be universal to all fields?
Regarding question 3, I’ve noticed similar issues with the Artist field, but not for the Name field – all my original formatting under Name seems to have been retained upon import.
Thanks very much for any help or explanations you can provide, and as a newbie, thanks for your patience with my poorly framed questions.
