This is as much of a discussion than a specific request.

Previously requested here, (separate with ; ), here (for Subsonic, also separates with ; ), and here (general discussion).

Foobar & some others support using ; to separate within field.

OneTagger supports it but uses subgenres - I'm not fully sure how, though one option is by using a custom separate field; more info here.

Beets has canonical nested genres which is pretty cool.

Already in Strawberry if you tag a track with multiple genres split by ; e.g. "Microhouse;ClownPenis", that track will appear in a search for genre:microhouse and also genre:clownpenis, so that's great already. Similarly smart playlists work for "genre contains" any of multiple semicolon-separated terms.

A downside is that if you group your collection by genre, the full term is shown, not both separate terms, which will cause the genres grouping to become nightmarishly messy.

So I think feature request 1 is to allow Collection views which contain Genre to split tracks by semicolon and display the same track under both (or more) genre dropdowns.

Keen for your thoughts. Cheers!

1. Find an album name with a hyphen/dash in it, e.g. "Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)"
2. Make 2 new playlists with that album in it.
3. From playlist 1, copy that name exactly (I love that you can hit F2 to make editable)
4. In playlist 2, paste that name in the search bar. Nothing is returned until you delete the hyphen/dash.

@jonas any thoughts about this, chap?

More sleuthing has uncovered something. Puddletag shows various files with Playcounts with 2 values e.g. 0\0, 0\258, up to 0\65335.

I tried to delete those screwy counts in puddletag by overwriting them with 0 but it doesn't seem to have taken. Or they've regenerated.

Checking in kid3 it turns out that one of those files, with 0\258 has
FMPS_PLAYCOUNT=0
FMPS_Playcount=258.

If I listen to it once in strawberry:
FMPS_PLAYCOUNT=0,
FMPS_Playcount=259.
So strawberry increments FMPS_Playcount but not FMPS_PLAYCOUNT.

I wonder what the official/correct tag name is?
https://www.exiftool.org/TagNames/ID3.html this says it's "PCNT" for id3 v2.4
According to https://github.com/strawberrymusicplayer/strawberry/issues/1074 , FMPS_Playcount (Strawberry spelling) is CORRECT, so logically something else has been using FMPS_PLAYCOUNT.

But why do they (second entry, FMPS_Playcount) go up to 65335?
And does overwriting them with 0 in puddletag not work because it's displaying 2 variants of the same tag?
In puddletag I can't create separate columns for the 2 spellings because it automatically uppercases them but displays both.

non-strawberry solution: if your playlists are in a central location (e.g. /Music/playlists/) then you could 'search within files / search file contents' using whatever OS-default search tool you have handy?

Now if you were feeling INCREDIBLY saucy, you could setup a cron job to

1. scan all your playlists
2. create a database of songs [track URL] (rows) & playlists (columns), with cells filled by the playlist name; have a final column which concatenates all nonblank playlist columns, separated by semicolon
3. Write that final column to the Performer tag of those files
4. [manually/auto rescan collection in Strawberry then) search "performer:MyPlaylist" if you want the contents of the playlist in whichever Collection grouping scheme you've chosen (potentially useful/interesting), or (your main objective)
5. search for the song and look in the tags for the performer, or display the performer tag as a column.

Hi @jonas , is there a reason this wasn't added originally?
Potentially would massively inflate the library if all lyrics data were imported there?
It would be great to have this... any chance you could talk me though the blockers to implementing?
Cheers!

@nainggolouille I believe it happens automatically in the background

(Just in case you didn't know) you can change the sort order with the spanner icon.

Another low tech way to achieve this is load all of your tracks into a playlist and sort it how you like. Which you can do multiple times.

I enter "date acquired" as YYYY.MM.DD in Composer.
I recently noticed that 2 songs with composer 2024.10.30 are grouped under heading "M" instead of "0-9" like the others.
All are characters manually entered, and I've tried overwriting them with a manually-typed entry - no change.
If I change them to 2024.10.29, stays under M.
2024.10.22: M
2024.10.21: other files already exist with this value, correctly grouped in order under 0-9. When I change the 2 'offending' files to this date, they also get stored in the right place.
If I change them back to 2024.10.30: it goes back under M.

Through years of mostly unsuccessfully migrating across music players, my play counts have generally been reset each time, sadly.

Happily, strawberry saves these to the ID3s, which is great going forward.

However I've noticed that some of my files (about 1990 of 43878 tracks) have play counts increasing from the twenties, to hundreds, thousands, and lots of tens of thousands, 5 digits, specifically with blocks at
10496
16896 (loads of these)
25856
Max = 65335

Then I have two, one with 6384640 & one with 6881400.

Whole albums typically have the same playcount.

I'm not blaming strawberry for this, just wondering if there's any underlying structure/logic which could be extracted.
Ideally some simple mathematical conversion to play count. But I'm not holding my breath!

Any ideas, genius, wisdom, etc, appreciated.
Cheers!

@Sharky-PI adding info to this thread: searching the collection by
genre:microhouse
does find the example track, as does searching by
genre:clownpenis
So manual search works for semicolon-separated-subgenres, just not the GUI dropdown system.

@jonas alas. It wouldn't be possible to just modify the Collection > Genre view system to

1. Start with the existing genres
2. Remove all entries with ";" into a separate pool, keep the remainder in the 'main pool'
3. Split those by ";" into unique genres
4. Add that result to the 'main pool' from step 2?

@erdbär great news! Thanks for the info