Hi Paul. It’s a matter of convenience, abstraction of file formats and ease of use.
My previous post said “post v3.15.1”. You can in fact edit PERSONNEL now. Simply go to the UD Text editing panel, create a new UDTI named PERSONNEL, make sure the Separate Multiple Values option is unchecked, and manually add items one per line formatted as:
person - role
In Yate that’s about as basic as you can get. The only issue now is multiple existing PERSONNEL tags when read by Yate in FLAC files will be aggregated into a single representation separated by our multi-value delimiter. This means the visual representation will be a bunch of credits separated by ;;; sequences. You can still edit them, with Separate Multiple Values checked. In this case the credits will be written as separate FLAC tags as opposed to a single tag when newline is used as a delimiter. Both methods will work… for FLAC. In ID3 based files the actual file storage for multiple values differs. In this case Yate has no concept of automatically using non standard ID3 separators. … but if you’re creating new metadata, the first method will work fine for all file types.
I have a collection of about 40k tracks which have been painstakingly tagged over the years. My FLAC credits are stored in the very common PERFORMER tags formatted as:
person (role)
Credits in my ID3 based files have the credits stored in the Musician Credits and Involved People standard ID3 locations.
role=person{,person}...
Yate can hide the PERFORMER tag and users never have to know about it. It is abstracted up to a high level display of Musician Credits and Involved People. These high level fields support various aggregation and sorting capabilities. Editing is standardized for all audio file types and you do not have to worry about delimiter formats or the final storage of the data.
Roon has 6209 documented ‘roles’ and if a PERSONNEL credit specifies a different role it is ignored. Discogs has 624 ‘recommended’ roles. Other data sources have their own representations. If I have an album with a role populated from Discogs data I might have a role of ‘Acoustic Bass’. However the Roon equivalent is ‘Bass (Acoustic)’. From your documentation, the existing unknown credits will not be displayed… and they’re all in the wrong place regardless.
Your handling of disparate locations for some of the roles is good. As you can read separate tags for example, for ENSEMBLE, Yate users can map this item to a custom field which makes it far easier to manipulate and display. This also has to accomodate different file formats.
The proposed Credits Manager will hopefully remove all the low level fiddling from users. I’m hoping to be able to remap existing roles to Roon acceptable ones. I also want an “Are all my roles acceptable?” feature. I would like all of this to work across multiple tracks and file formats. This will be a higher level of functionality than what is offered today for Yate’s Musician Credits and Involved People fields.
The goal is to make it easier and more bulletproof for Yate users to manipulate Roon acceptable credits. However, in full disclosure mode, the new functionality will support anyone. It is entirely possible that I will allow multiple formats to be written so that compatibility is maximized across applications. As the ‘read’ data will be merged by Yate, this will have no detrimental effect.
Then there is the entire topic of automation. How well can I automate the functionality so that my entire collection gets batch processed.
There’s a lot to do but it looks like I have all the information I need.