Unwanted album split by Label/Publisher mapping

[AverageHoarder]

I recently noticed that some of my older self-ripped albums (without musicbrainz tags) were split seemingly arbitrarily.

This album for example:

When looking at the tags of tracks 8 and 9, the only things that differ are the existence of replay gain tags, totaldiscs and totaltracks tags and the fact that one of them stores "Taxim" as the Label (LABEL in hex) while the other stores it as the "Publisher" (ORGANIZATION in hex). This was probably introduced when changing tags of 2 of the songs with a program that has a different mapping than the one the CD was ripped with.

Tags of track 8:

Tags of track 9:

I personally don't think that the different tag mapping is enough to warrant a split. What do you think?

[epoupon]

Ah this is likely because of totaldiscs.
This is supposed to be the same for each track of each disc.
Otherwise you can tag the tracks with the same MusicBrainz release id, it will then ignore all tags and use this identifier to group the release.

[epoupon]

Just reread the code, labels and barcodes are supposed to be the same, too.

[AverageHoarder]

How unfortunate. I'm not exactly keen on going through a 5-digit number of albums to see if some of the tracks were edited with more than one program in the last 15 years which lead to these inconsistencies in mappings (label vs publisher and disctotal vs totaldiscs). It's not like the tracks have different labels or different totaldiscs values. Some simply have a value and others don't. Akin to the issue with there being 2 artists (1 with an MBID and 1 without but with the same name) it would be convenient for these cases (tag exists/tag does not exist) to be merged while still splitting if there are 2 different values.

[epoupon]

Actually disc count should be read from either disctotal or totaldiscs.
Publisher could likely be a fallback to label, will investigate.

You are right about mbids fallbacks, I already planned to add an option to allow artist fallback if there is no mbid.

[AverageHoarder]

I'm not sure if that will fix the issue. As stated in my initial post, the tag is saved as ORGANIZATION when viewing the file in a hex editor. Mp3tag seems to map that to the PUBLISHER tag internally but I do not know if TagLib shares this mapping.

Kid3 for example also shows the tag as Organisation:

[epoupon]

Ok my bad. Can you send me two heterogeneous files of this release so that I can have a look? You can send them at tmp49-tmp49@yahoo.com?

[AverageHoarder]

My email provider doesn't allow files this big sadly.
However I've dug into the topic a bit deeper.
The internal mapping of Mp3tag is documented in the program itself.

So the correct tag to target is ORGANIZATION.
There have also been a couple discussions of label vs. publisher vs. organization over the years in the Mp3tag forum.
Here are some links if you also want to dig deeper.
Label&Publisher
FLAC tagging field name “Publisher” (Organization)
The Case for a Dedicated LABEL Tag

Usually, Label and Publisher/Organization are used interchangeably, but some users do differentiate between them.

[AverageHoarder]

@epoupon Does this information suffice? If not I can upload two of the files and send you a download link.

[epoupon]

It should be ok, will tell you in a few days when back to business!

[epoupon]

Hmm I have doubts now, can you please send me a link with a couple of files?

[AverageHoarder]

Sure. Here are the 2 from my initial post. Password is: epoupon

[epoupon]

Thanks!