As stated earlier, this topic gets brought up all the time here.
So, what fields support lists?
You can check this yourself. Go to Tools --> Options --> Library
Click on any of the fields, press edit and look at data type. Technically, any field supports lists through MC, it's just that J River doesn't allow us to edit some of the default fields (like Artist & Genre). Any user created (custom) field, however, may be set to a delimited list ( ";" is the delimiter, not "&")
So as others have stated, there is a workaround (just create custom list field and use the copy fields function) but I believe this is clumsy and unnecessary when there is an easy fix: just let us change the data type for artist/genre etc IF WE WANT TO. I don't see any value in having to duplicate information inside the tag.
The problem is that allowing delimited data in standard tag fields (like artist, album, etc) would most likely break compatibility with other software.
Not true. Current ID3 tags don't store lists. It's up to the software to recognise a delimiter and construct the list. I think windows media player uses "/". So if my artist is stored in the ID3 tag as Bob / Fred, I will get two separate list entries in WMP, whereas in MC, I get "Bob / Fred" as a single entry.
If MC allows us to delimit default fields, I can enter "Bob; Fred" as my artist and get two separate list entries. Compataibility with other programs wouldn't be severed, the field would just show up as the single entry "Bob; Fred" in other media players.
Have the program developers ever given us a good answer to this recurrent question?
No, I don't think a satisfactory answer has been provided by development staff. I think it's about time this happened though.