Multi value tag capability
Dear Blusound support and technical Team,
first of all I must say I'm a big fan of you, I literally love my node2i and I think the BluOS is in general a very good application.
I have two questions: one is about multi value tag capability, and in particular about the search function with it.
Flac files have tag method based on vorbis comment that support multi value tags. Mp3 (and Mp4, aiff, wav) with ID3 also supports multiple values. The two metadata containers separate the value differently: vorbis comment simply has more than one instance of the same tag. ID3 uses a null character to separate multiple values on the same tag.
Normally every Tag editing software has his method to show the separation between values:
dbpoweramp has ; (semicolon), mp3tag uses \\ (double backslash)
As far as I understood from other posts here,
-when the BluOS application find a multi value tag i.e. ARTIST, it does trunk the field at the first value of the set, and this cause the lost of the rest of information on that field of the other values.
For example, if (considering a FLAC file) one track has the two performers Maria Callas and Giuseppe di Stefano, in the beginning of the file among other tags, the artist(s) will be indicated like that:
ARTIST=Maria Callas
ARTIST=Giuseppe di Stefano
it is possible to find it opening the file with an exadecimal editor
BlueOS app, by reading the file, only shows Maria Callas as artist of the track. This can be partially solved merging the two artists in a single value tag, like
ARTIST= Maria Callas & Giuseppe di Stefano
and the multi value tag become a single value tag as result of concatenation of his single different values.
Unfortunately by doing this way
Maria Callas, Giuseppe di Stefano, Maria Callas & Giuseppe di Stefano, Giuseppe di Stefano & Maria Callas become four different artists
This issue can be applied to other metadata fields also, probably the GENRE would be one of the most appreciated for a multi value managing capability.
The first question is: is there any possibility to have in future update the capability to manage multi value metadata, that is to show, and retrieve the values with search function?
The second question is about the search function: It doesn't work if keywords are not put in the exact combination as they are in the metadata.
For example if I want to find and play a particular Concerto from the composer Chopin of the performer Pollini the best thing would be use the three keywords like "concerto" "Chopin" "Pollini" and have the list of all and only tracks that have these three keywords as tags or part of them.
Do you think would be possible to have this feature in future updates?
Thanks for the time
Giorgio
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Adding a request to implement multi-value tagging capability. Very frustrating that this has been a request for apparently four years. And there is an industry standard for this I understand.
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I switched from Bluesound to Lyrion, the successor to the Logitech Media Server.
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After 6 weeks, I'm relatively new to BluOS. I was very surprised that BluOS apparently only accepts the first value of multiple value tags and simply ignores all values after the first.
I'm even more surprised that this has apparently been an issue for 5 years and nothing has been done about it so far. So I'm starting another attempt and asking for this to be implemented. Above all, in my opinion, this isn't a feature request or some kind of nice-to-have. BluOS simply doesn't handle multiple value tags as intended.
An example:
metaflac.exe --show-tag=ARTIST --show-tag=ALBUMARTIST '.\08-Coal Chamber, Ozzy Osbourne - Shock The Monkey.flac'Result:
ARTIST=Coal Chamber
ARTIST=Ozzy Osbourne
ALBUMARTIST=Coal ChamberTagged this way, BluOS will never find this song in connection with Ozzy Osbourne. The song appears exclusively with the artist Coal Chamber.
Of course, this doesn't just apply to the artist tag, but generally to any other tag like genre, etc.
Like some before me in this thread, I also come from the Squeezebox/Lyrion music server world after almost 20 years, and this was never an issue there. Does the Bluesound team plan to address this issue in the near future? As mentioned at the beginning, it's been five years since the initial request.
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+1
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Yes, PLEASE get this done.
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+1
I would have bought at least two more players if it had this feature.
Not having the feature stops me playing music how I want (e.g. "Female Vocal") when some files are tagged "Jazz" AND "Female Vocal", and others "Folk" AND "Female Vocal".
The suggestion that I create loads of play lists and individually add songs to the lists is ludicrous! That's exactly what tagging is for.
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+1
This is an indispensable feature for classical music.0 -
+7
Should have been implemented years ago, especially for artist and genre tags.
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Very glad this topic is being revived here. Does anyone know if Bluesound has acknowledged the issue? Is there any sort of structural problem inherent in the software which is preventing a solution?
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+1
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Frankly, I also have the impression that Bluesound isn't aware of the problem. Or they see it as a feature request, although I consider it a bug if tags aren't handled as intended.
I wrote a request to support four weeks ago. I was referring exactly to this initial post from five years ago and wanted to know if there was a foreseeable timeframe for a solution to this problem. Surprisingly, I was advised to retag my audio files with mp3tag and perform an index rebuild. I only retagged one of the affected files, and that didn't change anything, as I had determined with metaflac.exe. It saved me a lot of time.
In the end, it turned out that they would forward this to the Quality Assurance Team and the BluOS Development Lab. After that, my request was marked as "solved," which I found quite... hmm... interesting.
If there's no official response in the foreseeable future, I'll submit a follow-up to my initial support request mentioned above. I wouldn't even mind if Bluesound said they would never support multiple values in metatags in the future. I hope not, but it would be a statement, and I would then know that this system isn't suitable for my purposes.
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Yes, mp3tag is not the answer. I use it and blue sound does not recognize the multiple tags. I agree, just a statement from Bluesound that they acknowledge the issue and will (or will not) work to address it would be helpful.
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Bluesound suggesting to use mp3tag means they fundamentally do not understand the problem people are facing in this thread. So to any BlueSound employee looking at this thread and trying to understand where we're coming from, I'm going to try and explain it in this post.
First we need to understand that vorbis comments, the standard used to tag flac files, allows for non unique field names to occur. This means that a file can have multiple ARTIST field names for example, according to the xiph.org documentation https://xiph.org/vorbis/doc/v-comment.html
Next we need to know how common tagging systems handle this. Foobar2000 and mp3tag both suggest separating multiple values with a semicolon. So in foobar2000 for example, a track tagged like this:
appears like this in foobar2000:
which in turn appears like this in the BluOS controller:
BluOS completely ignores the second artist. This means that if I search for the artist Mitsuto Suzuki, this track will not come up as a result.
Competitors to bluOS get this right however. Here's the same track on Roon:
Mitsuto Suzuki correctly appears as a second artist and the track comes up when searching for his name in Roon. Here is how Roon displays the tags:
I think this speaks to a fundamental issue with BlueSound's priorities. BlueSound continues to implement and update support for dozens of streaming services but customers who maintain their own digital music collection are left in the dust when it comes to fundamental features. Their most knowledgeable userbase are treated like we don't know what we're even asking for when some of us have been curating their digital music collection for 30 years at this point. Roon is a great product that solves every issue I have with BluOS, but I shouldn't have to pay $15 a month to listen to my own music library. I would really like to be able to recommend BluOS devices to my friends, but fundamental issues like this prevent me from doing so.
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+100
Should indeed have been implemented years ago, ESPECIALLY for artist and genre tags.
Genre tags just make no sense without multiple tag search capacity of the player.
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I think this speaks to a fundamental issue with BlueSound's priorities. BlueSound continues to implement and update support for dozens of streaming services but customers who maintain their own digital music collection are left in the dust when it comes to fundamental features. Their most knowledgeable userbase are treated like we don't know what we're even asking for when some of us have been curating their digital music collection for 30 years at this point. Roon is a great product that solves every issue I have with BluOS, but I shouldn't have to pay $15 a month to listen to my own music library. I would really like to be able to recommend BluOS devices to my friends, but fundamental issues like this prevent me from doing so.
Shame it isn’t open source. One of those knowledgeable users may have fixed this by now.
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Interesting that this post is being "reactivated". I posted on it years ago and already at the time couldn't believe that BluOS was not implementing the multitagging, a feature that was available on such an old device as Squeezebox (which was way in advance for its time).
I agree with most of what has been said here. I really think this is not a priority of BluOS developper. But, following the discussion about the integration of Qobuz connect, I just have the impression that Bluesound doesn't really listen to customers anymore. I hope it is for good reasons, Ifor example if they were doing a deep refresh of the entire software to stay competitive. However, I am more afraid that it is a situation where they think their software is good enough, and they sell enough products to make good buisness, so that they don't need to listen to customers, which would be very sad...0
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