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Metadata and the VGM format

Technical discussion about the VGM format, and all the software you need to handle VGM files.

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  • blitzlunar Offline
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Metadata and the VGM format

Post by blitzlunar »

I'm experiencing some problems with VGM format relating to tagging; perhaps things which many people wouldn't notice as, granted, some of what I like to do with my music collection is idiosyncratic and nerdy. :mrgreen: I am using foobar2000 and the latest component.
  1. Artist Name: Semicolons are occasionally used in sets to separate names e.g. "Isao Abe; Yuko Takehara". I have only noticed this phenomena with vgmrips VGM sets, and not all of them are like this. All project2612 sets use commas as far as I can tell. foobar2000 renders these semicolons as commas in the playlist anyway, however it still has the effect of the Last FM scrobbler only reading the first artist and not the entire artist field. More unusual is that it does not appear possible to manually change these semicolons to commas within foobar2000's tag editor. This is a meagre concern, but I thought worth pointing out as I'm curious as to what's going on here.
  • Genre: Unfortunately this field seems to be unsupported. I only recently started using the Genre field in any way shape or form, for the purpose of creating foobar2000 autoplaylists. It can be very useful/fun if you use multiple hashtags ie. #konami, #rpg, #metal and whatnot. I have a rather extensive #xmas playlist now, and it would be great to include VGM format songs in it as well. :)
  • Composer, Performer, Album Artist: All of these fields are unsupported as far as I know; granted that I have limited use for them. Perhaps the Composer field is useful for those occasions when a game's sound producer is arranging music by someone else and you want their name in the Artist field, but you still want to mention the original composer so that the song appears in media library searches.
  • Track Number, Total Tracks, Disc Number, Total Discs: Also seem to be unsupported. Again this is not essential as filenames can pick up some of the slack.
  • Non-standard fields: For example, playback statistics like <RATING>, which is particularly useful. Fortunately it's still possible to rate VGMs with foobar2000, but writing this information to the tag is more secure the the long-term than relying on fb2k's database.
I don't know if the fault lies with the VGM format here per se; I think it is more to do with the foobar2000 component having incomplete tag writing facilities, as I do have a scarce few VGMs in my collection with Genre, Track Number and Disc Number info in them (however, as soon as one edits these files in foobar2000, all of that information disappears. xD) Ultimately, my question or request is: is there a possibility that these features could be handled by the plugin in future?

Thanks, and once again, thank you all for your tireless efforts in bringing this resource into the public domain.
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Post by Tom »

Also known as nineko.
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Post by Shywolf »

blitzlunar wrote:... Artist Name: Semicolons are occasionally used in sets to separate names e.g. "Isao Abe; Yuko Takehara". I have only noticed this phenomena with vgmrips VGM sets, and not all of them are like this. ...
The general practice is to use commas to separate composers' names. It would seem there are some (probably very old) files out there that are not following the guidelines...

Overall, for editing metadata of VGM files, it's better to use vgm_tag. The FB2K plugin IIRC is developed by a third party and may not have feature parity with the latest vgmplay/in_vgm.dll builds, let alone the latest version of the VGM format itself.
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Post by ValleyBell »

Some older VGMs use semicolons to separate authors, because that was the standard on SMSPower. Some other VGMs use commas to separate single composers and semicolons to separate author groups. (i.e. "original composer; rearranger")
I try to get rid of the former when updating/approving packs, but I thought the latter is sort of valid, so I usually keep it.

For editing VGM metadata, any tool should work. The GD3 format hasn't changed since its initial version from the early 2000s. (In the beginning there were a few bugs in VGMToolbox that caused broken loops, but IIRC they were all fixed a few years ago.)

Post by vampirefrog »

Sounds like a problem with the foobar plugin mostly, not the VGM format. The plugin can replace semicolons with commas easily and fix your separation problem.
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