Comment Editor

Access: Click comment column cell button (Editor 2), or double-click the cell (depending upon Preferences setting)

The ID3v2 Technical Specification and other tag types allows for multiple lines of text to exist in a comment field. Tag Clinic supports multi-line text fields in two ways:

1. Comment and other multi-line fields are shown in the Main Editor as one line of text with line breaks replaced by caret (^) symbols. When a tag is updated, carets are replaced with newline character codes (hex '0D0A'). Remove a line break by removing a caret. To add one, type in a caret anywhere you would like a new line to begin.
2. Many multi-line fields are too long to view or edit comfortably on the single line shown in the Main Editor. To edit or view long text entries, click the "ellipse button" appearing to the right in a cell when it's selected. This executes a stand-alone subeditor, as shown below for the Comment field (subeditors may also be set to execute by double-clicking on a cell - see topic Preferences).

Two copies of the comment field's contents are shown. The copy on the left is an optional read-only copy (see "View > Original Text" on the Menu bar) which can be used as a reference or copy source. The copy on the right may be edited and becomes the new tag contents when the OK, Up or Down button is clicked.

Optional data fields:

1. Description: A brief description or summary describing the overall content or purpose of the comment. This information is stored as a separate subfield within the comment frame itself. Because iTunes and other programs often use a comment field to store normalization and other data, and since a unique identifier is used in this description field to identify them, many tag readers are now designed to skip over and not show a comment when it contains text in the description field. Use of this field is therefore not recommended and, by default, the field is disabled. To override the default behavior while using the Comment Editor, go to "View > Description editing" on the Comment Editor's Main Menu. To override indefinitely, go into Preferences and find "Enable comment description editing" on the "Tags" page. Note that Tag Clinic, whether of not description editing is enabled, does not normally show comments that it can identify as having been created by either iTunes* or MusicMatch.
2. Language: From this drop down list, select the language that the tag is written in. Like the description data above, this information is stored as a separate field within the comment frame.

Three conditions determine which language appears in this field when the Editor is executed:

• If there is already a comment field present in the tag and it contains a recognized language descriptor, the language associated with the descriptor appears.
• If there is already a comment field present in the tag but it contains an unrecognized language descriptor, the selection "Undetermined" appears.
• If there is no comment field present in the tag, it is assumed that a new comment is being added and the Default Language specified in Preferences is presented.

When renaming files using the ID3v2 comment field as part of the name, line breaks are removed and lines are concatenated to form a new name. Similarly, if V1 syncs with V2 is enabled on the Options Panel, line breaks are replaced with space characters in multi-line ID3v2 comments before being written to ID3v1 comment fields. Since the ID3v1 comment field can hold only a maximum of 28 characters, however, only the first 28 characters are written. When synchronizing, you can choose to have the ID3v1 comment field display either 1) the full text it receives from ID3v2, regardless of length (Trim Overlength disabled), or 2) the text that will actually be written to the tag (Trim Overlength enabled). Tag types other than MP3 will accommodate any length of text in a comment field, with the exception of VQFs, which have a practical limit of about 780 characters. Text entered into a VQF tag field that exceeds this limit is automatically truncated.

When a change is made to an ID3v1 Comment while V2 syncs with V1 is enabled, the entire contents of the ID3v2 Comment field is replaced with the single-line ID3v1 comment text.

When saving comments to multiple files with the Single-Tag Editor, any carets in the comment field are interpreted as newline characters and the content is saved as a multi-line comment, if the tag type allows. When saving to ID3v1 tags, carets are replaced with space characters before being written.

Multiple Comments -

The Comment Editor supports the existence of multiple comments in a single tag. Tags that contain more than one comment are flagged in the Main Editor by a small red triangle appearing in the upper right corner of a cell (as are other cells that support multiple instances). Briefly holding the mouse pointer over a cell containing this indicator will produce a small "hint" giving the number of comments contained in the tag.

Use the Comment Editor's Add button to insert additional comments into a tag, or the Delete button to remove one. New comments created have their language setting automatically set to the Default Language specified in Preferences' Tag Options section.

When multiple comments are present in a tag, only the first one is operated upon by tag synchronizations, column data swaps, and most other kinds of multi-file operations. For example, if ID3v2 tags are set to synchronize with ID3v1 when an ID3v1 comment is deleted, only the first ID3v2 comment in the corresponding ID3v2 tag is deleted as a result of synchronization. If a second comment exists in the tag, it will take the place of the first one in the Main Editor.

*iTune Comments -

iTunes stores its audio normalization and equalization data for MP3s in custom ID3v2 comment frames identifiable by a comment description field containing text "iTunNORM." These frames contain hexadecimal text data and are not normally edited manually, nor would one normally want to view them. By default, Tag Clinic skips over these frames whenever displaying or processing MP3 comments so that they become, in effect, transparent to the user. Tag operations that remove entire tags will remove these frames, but other operations look for them and bypass them when found.

You can manually remove iTunes frames from all files, or from just selected files, by choosing Main Menu > ID3v2 > Remove iTune comment frames (<Alt + 6>). If desired you can disable Tag Clinic's default handling of iTune frames by manually editing its Initialization File to allow them to be displayed and processed just like any other comment frames. In the install folder, look for file "TagClinic.ini." With a text editor, edit the statement "ShowITune=0" in section "[MiscSettings]" in this file so that it reads "ShowITune=1".