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Multiple Items and Multiple Values

Yate supports multiple items for field types wherever supported by the ID3 specification. It also permits multiple values for fields wherever permitted.

When more than one item of a particular field type is supported, you can manage those items by viewing the specific panel designed for that type. Panels are viewed and mapped via right clicking on a tab in the edit panel. Where the field has a default value (for example the Comments field), you can access the multiple item editor by clicking on the function button for the default field. The following field types may have more than one item:

Artwork
Comments
Commercial Information Webpage
Equalization
General Encapsulated Object
Lyrics
Official Artist/Performer Webpage
Private Information
Rating
Relative Volume Adjustment
Terms of Use
Unhandled Items
Unique File Identifier
User Defined Text Info
User Defined URL

Yate presents defaults for some multiple item types. The default items are defined as follows:

Artwork

The default artwork item is the first found in an audio file.

Comments

The default Comment is the first comment with an empty description.

Commercial Information Webpage

The default Commercial Information Webpage item is the first found in an audio file.

Lyrics

The default Lyrics is the last lyric item. This was done for iTunes compatibility.

Official Artist/Performer Webpage

The default Official Artist/Performer Webpage item is the first found in an audio file.

Rating

The default rating is the first rating in an audio file.

Terms of Use

The default Terms of Use item is the first found in an audio file.

Multiple values are completely different than multiple items. The ID3 specification allows for most text oriented fields to contain multiple values. These values are separated by a character with a binary value of zero. On the Settings - Audio Files tab, you may set a visible delimiter to represent the invisible zero character. This delimiter is used for all file types ... not only for those where the tags are ID3 encoded. The default value is ;;;. So if you see ;;; in your fields it means that you have more than one value in the field. You can edit the multiple values, one per line, (without worrying about the delimiter) by selecting Choose Value for a field's function button menu.

Multiple values are useful for some field types such as Genre where you might want to have more than one piece of identifying information.

A word of caution: Many other applications, including Apple Apps, do not support the multiple values capability and as such you may have strange displays of metadata if you utilize multiple values.

While the multi-value delimiter is the correct means of separating multiple items in fields, Yate optionally permits the use of non standard delimiters when splitting and reconstructing fields associated with Application Lists.