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[hcshrader]

Is there any way to recognize the Album label.  For example, RCA Living Presence recording are kind of special.  I'd occasional like to search by that tag.  Other than Grouping, would there be a Label Tag or what would be the analogous? Or maybe there is a better way of doing it?

Thanks!

[JimH]

Welcome to the forum.  I don't think there is a standard tag, but you can create a custom tag.

[Vocalpoint]

Is there any way to recognize the Album label.  For example, RCA Living Presence recording are kind of special.  I'd occasional like to search by that tag.  Other than Grouping, would there be a Label Tag or what would be the analogous? Or maybe there is a better way of doing it?

Thanks!

I added two specific custom tags to handle this for my FLAC library - with very specific naming conventions:

Label
LabelNo

Adding these two tags allows me store all relevant label and catalog numbers - plus it all transfers nicely to MP3 when transcoding files for mobile usage.

Cheers!

VP

[hcshrader]

Many thanks!

[JustinChase]

I added two specific custom tags to handle this for my FLAC library - with very specific naming conventions:

Label
LabelNo

Adding these two tags allows me store all relevant label and catalog numbers - plus it all transfers nicely to MP3 when transcoding files for mobile usage.

I use the built-in [Catalog #] where you are using LabelNo and I use either Comments and/or Notes for label type, or release version information, just to avoid making a new field. (1st Japanese pressing, ripped from vinyl, UK Harvest release, etc)

Just mentioning for the sake of providing options, not that your method isn't perfectly fine

[Vocalpoint]

I use the built-in [Catalog #] where you are using LabelNo and I use either Comments and/or Notes for label type, or release version information, just to avoid making a new field. (1st Japanese pressing, ripped from vinyl, UK Harvest release, etc)

Just mentioning for the sake of providing options, not that your method isn't perfectly fine

I added LabelNo specifically after having a chat with Alex some time ago when I was having issues with ensuring FLAC tag data moved to MP3 seamlessly. He mentioned that having the tags (specifically named) Label and LabelNo within a FLAC file in MC - would allow for these two tags to map properly over to a standard ID3v2 MP3 container. If I used MC's Catalog # - I seem to remember that field not being transferred to any MP3 upon conversion. It could also have had something to do with ensuring that field data was in the right place in another tagger or app...can't remember exact details now

Edit: Found the thread...

http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=58739.msg397311#msg397311

Cheers,

VP

[JustinChase]

Good to know!

I'm just getting some time again to spend on tagging my flac files, so maybe I'll just change to do it the way you describe, since it's really not a problem to create a couple of new fields, and you've gotten it 'straight from the horses mouth' that your method is preferred.

I have enough trouble with things without 'going against the grain'

thanks.

[Sesam]

I have been under the impression that the FLAC standard is using the "Publisher" tag for the record labels name, and the "Catalog #" for exactly what it says. Anyway that was the conclusion I came to when I researched (googled) this, and how I have been tagging my music

[kstuart]

I have been under the impression that the FLAC standard is using the "Publisher" tag for the record labels name, and the "Catalog #" for exactly what it says. Anyway that was the conclusion I came to when I researched (googled) this, and how I have been tagging my music

The Official FLAC tagging standard is:

Below is a proposed, minimal list of standard field names with a description of intended use. No single or group of field names is mandatory; a comment header may contain one, all or none of the names in this list.

TITLE
    Track/Work name
VERSION
    The version field may be used to differentiate multiple versions of the same track title in a single collection. (e.g. remix info)
ALBUM
    The collection name to which this track belongs
TRACKNUMBER
    The track number of this piece if part of a specific larger collection or album
ARTIST
    The artist generally considered responsible for the work. In popular music this is usually the performing band or singer. For classical music it would be the composer. For an audio book it would be the author of the original text.
PERFORMER
    The artist(s) who performed the work. In classical music this would be the conductor, orchestra, soloists. In an audio book it would be the actor who did the reading. In popular music this is typically the same as the ARTIST and is omitted.
COPYRIGHT
    Copyright attribution, e.g., '2001 Nobody's Band' or '1999 Jack Moffitt'
LICENSE
    License information, eg, 'All Rights Reserved', 'Any Use Permitted', a URL to a license such as a Creative Commons license ("www.creativecommons.org/blahblah/license.html") or the EFF Open Audio License ('distributed under the terms of the Open Audio License. see http://www.eff.org/IP/Open_licenses/eff_oal.html for details'), etc.
ORGANIZATION
    Name of the organization producing the track (i.e. the 'record label')
DESCRIPTION
    A short text description of the contents
GENRE
    A short text indication of music genre
DATE
    Date the track was recorded
LOCATION
    Location where track was recorded
CONTACT
    Contact information for the creators or distributors of the track. This could be a URL, an email address, the physical address of the producing label.
ISRC
    ISRC number for the track; see the ISRC intro page for more information on ISRC numbers.

Implications

    Field names should not be 'internationalized'; this is a concession to simplicity not an attempt to exclude the majority of the world that doesn't speak English. Field contents, however, use the UTF-8 character encoding to allow easy representation of any language.
    We have the length of the entirety of the field and restrictions on the field name so that the field name is bounded in a known way. Thus we also have the length of the field contents.
    Individual 'vendors' may use non-standard field names within reason. The proper use of comment fields should be clear through context at this point. Abuse will be discouraged.
    There is no vendor-specific prefix to 'nonstandard' field names. Vendors should make some effort to avoid arbitrarily polluting the common namespace. We will generally collect the more useful tags here to help with standardization.
    Field names are not required to be unique (occur once) within a comment header. As an example, assume a track was recorded by three well know artists; the following is permissible, and encouraged:

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

It's interesting that they say that for Classical, "Artist" is "Bach" and "Performer" is "Glenn Gould", rather than using Artist for the performer, and Composer.

[JustinChase]

Sesam, if you convert a flac to mp3, do your tags show up correctly in the resultant mp3 file?

[Vocalpoint]

I have been under the impression that the FLAC standard is using the "Publisher" tag for the record labels name, and the "Catalog #" for exactly what it says. Anyway that was the conclusion I came to when I researched (googled) this, and how I have been tagging my music

Well - those are cool choices if you always plan on only staying with those songs in that single file format (and never transcode to MP3 for example).

However - I just ran the following test and can now confirm why I specifcally use LABEL and LABELNO:

Since I use three different tools for metadata management (dbPowerAmp, Tag N Rename and MC) - it was important to try to get as much "agreement" on certain tag fields as possible. And leave MC out of it for the moment.

1. Ripped a single track from an Animal Logic CD in dbPoweramp into FLAC format - just so I could see it's default tag placement
2. Upon a quick inspection - I could see a tag called "Label" got a value of I.R.S. Records (just using the default metadata retrieved by dbPowerAmp)
3. I did not see any reference to LABELNO in this first pass
4. I then open the same FLAC track in Tag N Rename and saw that T&R picked up the LABEL value of I.R.S. Records (placed presumably by dbPowerAmp)
5. I then manually typed the Animal Logic CD number into the "Catalog #" field within Tag & Rename
6. I then reexamined the full tag structure in dbPowerAmp and now can see a new tag called LABELNO (obviously filled by T&R in step 5)



7. If I then open the track in MC (with my custom fields called LABEL and LABELNO on as standard) these fields are immediately filled with values places within Steps 1-6
8. Nowhere in any of these files edited by my specific tools is there any mention of tags named Publisher or Catalog #.

So - for my personal library management - using any other fields other than LABEL and LABELNO makes no sense - as it seems that at least the two other tools that I use regularly won't pick them up should I need to transfer a file over to dbPowerAmp or Tag N Rename.

The easiest solution was to add these two (LABEL and LABELNO) to my MC db and it takes care of tags in all three apps.

VP

[kstuart]

So all you are saying is that dbPowerAmp is doing it incorrectly, but you want to stick with that, since you use it, which is fine.

From the FLAC site, "Organization" is the correct place to put Record Label:

ORGANIZATION
    Name of the organization producing the track (i.e. the 'record label')

[JustinChase]

5. I then manually typed the Animal Logic CD number into the "Catalog #" field within Tag & Rename
6. I then reexamined the full tag structure in dbPowerAmp and now can see a new tag called LABELNO (obviously filled by T&R in step 5)

This is a bit surprising, as one would not expect a field labeled Catalog # to populate a tag called LABELNO, but that is clearly what is happening.

I assume that the regular field in MC called "Catalog #" is never populated in your testing?

Gotta love 'standards'  

[Vocalpoint]

So all you are saying is that dbPowerAmp is doing it incorrectly, but you want to stick with that, since you use it, which is fine. From the FLAC site, "Organization" is the correct place to put Record Label:

Not saying anything about right and wrong. As you can see - dbPowerAmp also placed the record label in the Organization field as well as the "label" field. I do not use Organization so I do not use that tag. Not sure if dbPowerAmp or Tag N Rename conform to any standards....but I really don;t care. All I wanted is the most common tags available to all three apps.

This is a bit surprising, as one would not expect a field labeled Catalog # to populate a tag called LABELNO, but that is clearly what is happening. I assume that the regular field in MC called "Catalog #" is never populated in your testing? Gotta love 'standards'  

Catalog # does not exist in any file tags that I can see.

I will try another test - this time from MC first - and then examine what MC places in dbPowerAmp. Then take a look in Tag N Rename.

VP

[kstuart]

In the development history of MP3TAG, I found:

[2007-08-19]  CHG: field ORGANIZATION is mapped to PUBLISHER at Vorbis Comments now.

The program documentation is very terse, but from poking around the program, I think that it actually writes APEV2 tags for FLAC files.   PUBLISHER is an APEV2 Tag name.

[Vocalpoint]

K...here is more test results...this time same track ripped in MC to start and then opened in dbPowerAmop to examine the tags:



Then the same in Tag N Rename

Tab 1



And then tab 2



I then went ahead and typed in the record label (using Label field) and the CD number (using the Catalog # field) in Tag N Rename resulting in this when opened in dbPowerAmps tag display...



And then finally - I opened the file in MC with the full tag panel open (including Publisher and Catalog # fields) which are empty.



It's clear that MC has no connection to Organization (via Publisher) or LabelNo (via Catalog # ) as written by at least these two mainstream apps. But it works perfectly if one simply adds LABEL and LABELNO as custom fields to the MC db.

VP

[MrC]

Don't dbPowerAmp and Tag & Rename both allow in and out tag mappings?  If so, it seems any scheme will work to allow tagging in all three apps.  They just need to be configured to conform to each other.

[Vocalpoint]

Don't dbPowerAmp and Tag & Rename both allow in and out tag mappings?  If so, it seems any scheme will work to allow tagging in all three apps.  They just need to be configured to conform to each other.

News to me...but if so - do tell !

VP

[JustinChase]

couple questions.  do your LABEL and LABELNO fields need to be fully capitalized, or will Label and LabelNo work okay?  Nevermind, I see your screenshot shows them.

Second.   What happens if you rip the file in MC, then put the Publisher and Catalog # tags in MC, then check in the other 2 programs?  Do any fields get populated with MC having these values?

I don't really use either of those 2 programs, so it's not super important to me either way right now, but one never knows when they might start doing it differently.  i suppose it would only take a couple minutes to create those fields, then copy from the MC fields to the new ones to migrate the data if one needed to do so, at some point.

Again, I'm more just curious than particularly invested in either solution.  Not creating more fields seems 'easier', but not difficult to do either

Thanks for all your testing.

PS  has anyone looked to see if tags can be scraped from Discogs, and if so, what fields do they use?  just curious

[Vocalpoint]

Second.   What happens if you rip the file in MC, then put the Publisher and Catalog # tags in MC, then check in the other 2 programs?  Do any fields get populated with MC having these values?

Will give it a whirl....hang on...

EDIT:

MC "creates" a field called Catalog # and fills it and the value placed into Publisher ends up in Organization in db Poweramps editor - so it seems we have a bit of agreement here - at least on one field.

Then if I open that file in Tag N Rename - over there - the LABEL field now has a value (Presumably now been parsed from the Org/Publisher tag in MC) The Catalog # still has no value.

But if I value to the Catalog number in Tag N Rename...and save the edit...and then reopen it in MC's tag editor....

my custom LABELNO now has a value (as it should)

Personally I wish that MC would set the standard for all other apps to follow and at least we would have one app that could be counted on to create the "real deal"...but it is what it is.

My little custom fields do about as much as I need them to do for now.

VP

VP

[MrC]

News to me...but if so - do tell !

VP

I was thinking of Mp3Tag (not Tag & Rename); sorry.

This is all I know about dbPowerAmp: http://forum.dbpoweramp.com/showthread.php?26350-Mapping-of-metadata-between-file-formats&highlight=mapping

[JustinChase]

So, [Publisher] will flow from MC into you other programs, but it doesn't get populated if the data originates from them?  interesting.

Catalog # is its own island of information in MC it seems.

the good news for me is that I really only use MC for any tag management at this point, so compatibility with other programs is not terribly important yet.

Thanks again for all the testing and information.  I hope the OP found this beneficial

[Vocalpoint]

So, [Publisher] will flow from MC into you other programs, but it doesn't get populated if the data originates from them?  interesting.

Yes.

Catalog # is its own island of information in MC it seems.

And yep.

The good news for me is that I really only use MC for any tag management at this point, so compatibility with other programs is not terribly important yet. Thanks again for all the testing and information.  I hope the OP found this beneficial

No prob. My pleasure.

VP

[kstuart]

The thread that MrC linked, itself had a link to a great chart which seems to explain all the conversions:

http://age.hobba.nl/audio/tag_frame_reference.html

That one lists a FLAC tag "LABELNO" which is the catalog number, which corresponds to an APE tag called "CATALOG" but there is no MP3 tag about the catalog number at all.

That would explain why "LABELNO" works somewhat.

On the other hand, the site shows that "PUBLISHER" is the same in all the file format tags, so that looks like the best one to use instead of "LABEL".

[tiberiuspv]

Please note that the FLAC tags presented by dbPoweramp are not always exactly the tags in the file itself, as it does some amount of munging on tag names. The same caveat applies to the field values shown in MC. On the other hand, as far as I can tell, the raw FLAC tags show by MC (when you click the file name in the field panel) are the exact contents of the physical file tags.

The Hobba reference has been on my bookmarks for a long time, but it is quite outdated (not touched for 5 years...). Another (less complete and slightly different) list is at http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.php/SlimServerSupportedTags.

A fairly complete one is in the MP3Tag documentation at http://help.mp3tag.de/main_tags.html. The MP3Tag field names are exactly the FLAC tags except for a few which are in the tags mapping table of MP3Tag (for Year, Publisher and Track).

Overall, FLAC/Vorbis tags are a rather messy affair - a few too many 'standards'...

[Sesam]

I have to say this is a bigger mess than I thought . Personally I don't have any need to convert my FLAC's to any other format, but I do try to keep things as "standard" as possible.

So taking all things into consideration it appears that MC's "Catalog #" is not really compliant with anything, wouldn't it make sense that JRiver put LABELNO as a standard field instead?

[Vocalpoint]

So taking all things into consideration it appears that MC's "Catalog #" is not really compliant with anything, wouldn't it make sense that JRiver put LABELNO as a standard field instead?

Well - they could. However - it's probably faster to just add it yourself and rock on.

VP

[kstuart]

The same caveat applies to the field values shown in MC. On the other hand, as far as I can tell, the raw FLAC tags show by MC (when you click the file name in the field panel) are the exact contents of the physical file tags.

Can you clarify where one finds, in MC, the physical file tags ?  (And where are the ones that are not the exact contents?)

[MrC]

Tag Action Window, first line indicates the file type.  Click it when only one file is selected.

[tiberiuspv]

Can you clarify where one finds, in MC, the physical file tags ?  (And where are the ones that are not the exact contents?)

When you open the Tag window in MC (using the Tag command or Alt-Enter), you get a pane in the left column of MC which show all the populated field values from the selected track, i.e. how MC interpreted the tags which are physically in the file. There is a small menu you can access at the top left corner of the tag pane which allows you to choose to see the default tags, the tags which have a value, the tags which are in the current view, or all the tags. All of those refer actually to the field values.
If you hover your cursor just below the tag window banner, on the line which shows the details of the file (e.g. FLAC - 2:23 - 8.8 MB), you will see the field get underlined. If you click on it, the tag window is replaced with a FLAC window which gives you all the gory details of the exact info in the file, including every tag name and value (including tags which are not read by MC in your current setup). If you close that window, you get back to the normal 'tag' window.
This detailed FLAC window is very useful when you want to check for FLAC tag compatibility between various programs. As far as I know, it shows exactly the file contents, without any interpretation.