Twonky Forum

I believe that Twonky claim support for ID3v2.4. But 2.4 specifies that text fields can contain multiple values separated by a null character. Twonky does not implement this.

But I discovered (quite by accident - it's undocumented) that in all versions of server v5, commas in the upnp:genre tag do split the field into multiple values. This works in WMA tags as well (I've not tried any others). Since in my classical music collection I frequently record several artist names per track, I now put artist data into the upnp genre tag and have done a custom tree that displays this data. (This works fine apart from the fact that I can't get v5 to run satisfactorily on my NAS, so it's only useful when my PC is switched on.)

Can anyone offer an explanation of why Twonky allow multi-values in the Genre field? I should have thought that this is one field where mulitple values are never required! But someone must have written some specific code to support this - it can hardly be just a bug.

Feedback on whether other users would like to see muli-value field support in TwonkyMedia server would be welcomed.

Oh I absolutely LOVE multiple genres, it allows you to cut your music collection in all sorts of directions.

For example you may have a band that typically fits in a particular genre, then they cover a song from another genre, putting their own flavour on it, but still retaining elements of its original genre. Songs of this nature you might want to include in both genres.

Then you have lots of artists will release "unplugged" versions of their songs, which again you would want under the original genre of the song, but its also nice to have an "unplugged" genre so you can listen to an even of unplugged songs of various styles. Similar cross sections can be cut for "Live" or "Band and Orchestra" or other such variants that allow you to listen either by the genre of the music, or the genre of performance.

Then you can use genre to pull out other sorts of categorisation throughout your collections. For example adding a genre of "Hit" to key songs in your collection allows you to pick out the greatest hits across your collection, or just within one artist, which is not necessarily the same as the rating of the song.

My only complaint about this is that Twonky has chosen not to use an industry standard for this, so when I look at my media in other handlers (e.g. Media Monkey) it has "combination genres", so any song in more than one genre on Twonky, shows up in other products as being in a genre that is a specific group of genres e.g. "Rock,Live,Hit" as opposed to appearing in all 3 separately.

Now I just wish they'd allow you to do the same with Artists, so when one artist guests on another artist's song they'll show in both.

I like to use the multi value tags, but why twonky is not compliant to the ID3v2 standard? So no other programm can use the ID3 Tag!!

Here I snipped out the text from the ID3v2 standard:


>TCON
> The 'Content type', which previously was stored as a one byte numeric
> value only, is now a numeric string. You may use one or several of
> the types as ID3v1.1 did or, since the category list would be
> impossible to maintain with accurate and up to date categories,
> define your own.
> References to the ID3v1 genres can be made by, as first byte, enter
> "(" followed by a number from the genres list (appendix A.) and
> ended with a ")" character. This is optionally followed by a
> refinement, e.g. "(21)" or "(4)Eurodisco". Several references can be
> made in the same frame, e.g. "(51)(39)". If the refinement should
> begin with a "(" character it should be replaced with "((", e.g. "((I
> can figure out any genre)" or "(55)((I think...)". The following new
> content types is defined in ID3v2 and is implemented in the same way
> as the numerig content types, e.g. "(RX)".
> RX Remix
> CR Cover

So if a twonky programmer read this please implement the ID3v2 standard.

Is there a workaround? Does anybody have an idea?

Thanks

Erich

Hi

I don't know about ID3v2 but I've noticed that for Vorbis comments, you can create multiple comments by using \\ between the entries in MP3TAG; unfortunately, Twonky seems to only read the first one.

I just posted a reply about this here http://www.twonkyforum.com/viewtopic.ph ... 484#p25484 before noticing the above posts. It's something I'll experiment with as I wasn't aware of the multiple genre facility (I wonder if that works with FLAC/Vorbis).

It would be quite handy if someone from PV could give us a very brief heads-up on what does/doesn't work for both ID3v2 and Vorbis.

Bri

Hi

I just tried experimenting with John's trick of using the comma between genres to create two genre entries in Twonky 5.0.68. I tried it with a 24 bit 96 KHz FLAC (Vorbis comments) album by using the entry Blues,High Resolution and the album appears under both genres of Blues and High Resolution. That is a very cool and extremely useful find John; well spotted!

Bri

this is extremely valuabele for tagging classical albums !!

I 'll certainyl play around with it and report back. Thanks for pointing out, John !

Twonky-folks, you should advertise this feature really well. It's value-adding! (Asuming for now it works...)

-bump

It does work perfectly well for Genre Tag. Which is really great!

It does not seem to work on Album Artist.

-bump

There are the several music tracks are available .Twonky is compliant to the ID3v2 standard.I just tried experimenting with John's trick of using the comma between genres to create two genre entries in Twonky 5.0.68.

I was under the impression that this feature was not introduced until version 5.1.2

http://twonkyforum.com/viewtopic.php?f= ... 702#p34697

Release notes for TMS 5.1.2
----------------------------

New in Version 5.1.2:
+ Added a backup tool to create backups of Twonky's database (Windows releases only).

Changes:
o Re-Added "Composer" and "Personal Rating" to the advanced navigation tree
o Support multi value genre tag according to ID3v2
o Several enhancements in the mpeg parser.

The ID3V2 standard for multiple genres is to have multiple entries in the TCON field separated by () with no other delineating character. As the earlier email says 5.0.68 used a "," to separate values which was not to the ID3 standard. The change in 5.1.2 saw Twonky adopting the standard treatment for multiple genres.

See the info in http://www.id3.org/id3v2.3.0#head-42b02 ... 945dd849dc. I don't know what other apps will do with multiple genres separated by commas.

PB

Thanks PeeBee

That cleared that up that mystery for me