Genre tagging: using available tag and order sorting

[alan9990]

If it's at all helpful, I did a bit of digging around. Ended up finding this on a Sourceforge discussion:
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Multiple artists or genres: Both id3v2.3.0.txt (4.2) and id3v2.4.0-frames.txt (4.2) say that "there may only be one text information frame of its kind in an tag." In the case of IDv2.3 (TPE1), multiple artists shall be "seperated with the "/" character" and genres seem to be just concatenated (TCON has example "(51)(39)"). In the case of ID3v2.4 (4.2) "all text information frames supports multiple strings (..)". To create such a multi-string value, you have to separate the parts by pipe "|" symbols, e.g. "Bob Dylan|George Harrison|Jeff Lynne".
Multiple comments: Both id3v2.3.0.txt (4.2) and id3v2.4.0-frames.txt (4.10) says that "there may be more than one comment frame in each tag, but only one with the same language and content descriptor."
Therefore, multiple artists for ID3 tags should be possible using kid3-cli, and multiple comments with different descriptions can be hacked with the latest development version and kid3-cli -c "set comment 'Comment 1'" -c "set comment.description 'Description 1'" -c "set comment 'Comment 2'" -c "set comment.description 'Description 2'" /path/to/filename.mp3

Your example is with a FLAC file so all these lengthy explanations about ID3 tags may not be interesting for you. I just wrote it because I want Kid3 to handle different formats in a uniform way. I chose the pipe symbol to separate multiple strings because I think that it will normally not be used within the text of tags. In order to have a uniform handling for fields with multiple strings I suggest to split strings by the pipe symbol. Using

set artist 'Bob Dylan|George Harrison|Jeff Lynne'
for a FLAC file would result in the following Vorbis comment:

ARTIST=Bob Dylan
ARTIST=George Harrison
ARTIST=Jeff Lynne

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And which led me to wondering that a) well, if adding extra tags vs one extensive line is a breach of the standards then b) how is Minimserver processing tag information? Does it respect standards? In this case, it's not possible to have multiple tags for a single field.

Or, does Minimserver manage to extrapolate data and store in a database that's simply useful for browsing? And which is clearly a very good and valid thing. But how do I work out "where the line is/what is best practice" when it comes to tags with multiple values?

And I say this largely because it's been confirmed that Minimserver does not treat Genre tagging the way it does Album or Artist. Which to me makes it ever less clear exactly how I might proceed to create some 'definitive' version of my tags. And by this I mean either the actual tags added to the files, or via the very good remapping that Minimserver provides.