MinimServer Forum

Hi,

the MinimServer project has motivated me to revise the tagging of my music collection. Until now I haven't really cared about the AlbumArtist tag. I've read the MinimServer user guide and i now understand how the Artist and the AlbumArtist tags affect the appearance of the Artist and the All Artists index entries.

However, i don't fully get the point of the differences between the Artist and the AlbumArtist tags. Can somebody shortly explain there use in different cases?

Scenario 1:
There is a usual album containing just one artist (lets say Sting). Basically, there are 3 possibilities to tag Artist and AlbumArtist:
a) Write Sting to AlbumArtist only
b) Write Sting to Artist only
c) Write Sting to both Artist and AlbumArtist
From my understanding, possibility a) is not the best solution and possibilities b) and c) make no difference for the appearance in MinimServer. How should this be made and is there some kind of standard for tagging Artist and AlbumArtist?

Scenario 2:
Consider a compilation (e.g. a soundtrack) with titles from different artists. What i do now is to write the corresponding artist for each track to the Artist tag and the AlbumArtist tag will become 'Various Artists'. Doing this, 'Various Artists' will appear under the Artist index entry in MinimServer, which is somewhat not intended. Should i leave AlbumArtist empty for compilations? Is there 'the right way' to do it?

cheers, winxi

(15-08-2012 14:17)winxi Wrote: [ -> ]Scenario 1:
There is a usual album containing just one artist (lets say Sting). Basically, there are 3 possibilities to tag Artist and AlbumArtist:
a) Write Sting to AlbumArtist only
b) Write Sting to Artist only
c) Write Sting to both Artist and AlbumArtist
From my understanding, possibility a) is not the best solution and possibilities b) and c) make no difference for the appearance in MinimServer. How should this be made and is there some kind of standard for tagging Artist and AlbumArtist?

If the artist is the same for every track of the album you should not write AlbumArtist tag so that would be b). In short, you write the AlbumArtist in tags only when the track artist differ between 2 or more tracks of the same album (eg for *some* compilation, split eps, etc).

(15-08-2012 14:17)winxi Wrote: [ -> ]Scenario 2:
Consider a compilation (e.g. a soundtrack) with titles from different artists. What i do now is to write the corresponding artist for each track to the Artist tag and the AlbumArtist tag will become 'Various Artists'. Doing this, 'Various Artists' will appear under the Artist index entry in MinimServer, which is somewhat not intended. Should i leave AlbumArtist empty for compilations? Is there 'the right way' to do it?

cheers, winxi

One possible way to do it is to have 3 trees:

1. an Artist tree whose elements are only track artists (will not contain Various Artists or whatever other AlbumArtist tag values)
2. an Album Artist tree that contains all Albums Artists with Album Artist = Track artist for albums for which Album Artist is not defined (eg Artist is the same for all tracks)
3. a VA only tree that contains all VA albums (albums for which AlbumArtist tag is present)

Not that compilation doesn't imply an AlbumArtist tag. Take for example a "best of" Sting where every track has Artist = Sting. That's why compilations generally require a separate "COMPILATION" tag to mark them as such and to be able to display only compilations (subtree 4)

foo_upnp exposes subtree 1, 2 and 4.

Some more details on recommended Album Artist tag usage:

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?..._Standards

(15-08-2012 14:17)winxi Wrote: [ -> ]c) Write Sting to both Artist and AlbumArtist

Hi, C is the best option where AlbumArtist and Artist are the same (like Sting, or Pink Floyd, etc).

I have a lot of compilations and I use a single AlbumArtist entry for every album I have. What that means is that I now use AlbumArtist to navigate to my music about 99.999% of the time. The only time I'd use artist would be to find a contributing artist on one of the compilations. As I had to create these new AlbumArtist tags from nothing, I took the opportunity to use 'Surname, Fist Names' format for the AlbumArtist tags, but I just left all the artist ones as they come from the www (i.e. from Freedb etc).

Examples would be as below:

Single Artist Album:

AlbumArtist=Pink Floyd
Artist=Pink Floyd
Artist=Pink Floyd
Artist=Pink Floyd

Single Artist Album:

AlbumArtist=Bowie, David
Artist=David Bowie
Artist=David Bowie
Artist=David Bowie

Compilation Album:

AlbumArtist=Peel, John
Album=Right Time, Wrong Speed (Disc 1)
Artist=Buzzcocks
Artist=Stiff Little Fingers
Artist=The Cure

Compilation album:

AlbumArtist=Blue Note Sampler
Album=Blue Note Sampler
Artist=John Doe
Album=Noisy Bugger
Album=Betty Bazookas

(The above is a made up example where it might be sensible to leave the AlbumArtist the same as the Album name; it might be the most logical one to look for if you wanted to play that album.)

When I first did all this and discovered the AlbumArtist value, I configured MP3TAG to have an action which populates AlbumArtist with artist, then selected all my non-compilations and ran it (so that was things like Pink Floyd and David Bowie sorted).

I then selected all the compilations and used a different 'guess action' to populate all the AlbumArtist values with the album names. That meant the whole issue was usable after these two automated actions. My reasoning behind doing that with the compilations was that for albums like 'Ibiza Chillout Album', I'd rather have that as the AlbumArtist than just 'Various' (and it was only a temporary measure until I got round to manually re-tagging each album; as described below).

I then spent ages - at my leisure - working through all the compilations and rewriting the AlbumArtist values with the ones that I actually wanted (so that's when I populated the above with 'Peel, John'. Once that was done, I looked at all the single artist albums (like Pink Floyd and David Bowie) and renamed the ones with an artist name to the Surname, Firstname format (so that's when I changed David Bowie to Bowie, David).

I have never changed any artist values as that's what scrolls across the media player screen when it's playing (and I'd rather see it as 'David Bowie').

Bri

Many thanks for both your detailed replies and explanations! As I'm looking for some kind of standard, i will give bubbleguuum's suggestions a try.

cheers, winxi

(15-08-2012 14:17)winxi Wrote: [ -> ]Hi,

the MinimServer project has motivated me to revise the tagging of my music collection. Until now I haven't really cared about the AlbumArtist tag. I've read the MinimServer user guide and i now understand how the Artist and the AlbumArtist tags affect the appearance of the Artist and the All Artists index entries.

However, i don't fully get the point of the differences between the Artist and the AlbumArtist tags. Can somebody shortly explain there use in different cases?

Scenario 1:
There is a usual album containing just one artist (lets say Sting). Basically, there are 3 possibilities to tag Artist and AlbumArtist:
a) Write Sting to AlbumArtist only
b) Write Sting to Artist only
c) Write Sting to both Artist and AlbumArtist
From my understanding, possibility a) is not the best solution and possibilities b) and c) make no difference for the appearance in MinimServer. How should this be made and is there some kind of standard for tagging Artist and AlbumArtist?

This depends on which combination of the Artist / All Artists / AlbumArtist indexes you want to use to browse your colection.

1) If you want to use Artist, you can do either b) or c). They are equivalent, because MinimServer will automatically use the AlbumArtist tag value in the Artist index if the AlbumArtist tag is populated, and will use the Artist tag value otherwise.

2) If you want to use All Artists, you can do either b) or c). They are equivalent, because MinimServer won't use the AlbumArtist tag value in the All Artists index.

3) If you want to use AlbumArtist, you can do either a) or c). Using a) may cause problems with displaying artist information in the control point, because MinimServer doesn't currently send AlbumArtist information to the control point for individual tracks. This will change in a future release of MinimServer, but you might still have problems depending on how your control point handles this information.

Quote:Scenario 2:
Consider a compilation (e.g. a soundtrack) with titles from different artists. What i do now is to write the corresponding artist for each track to the Artist tag and the AlbumArtist tag will become 'Various Artists'. Doing this, 'Various Artists' will appear under the Artist index entry in MinimServer, which is somewhat not intended. Should i leave AlbumArtist empty for compilations? Is there 'the right way' to do it?

cheers, winxi

If you leave AlbumArtist empty, MinimServer will generate an Artist index entry by combining the Artist tag information for all the tracks of your compilation album, and it will send this value to the control point as the artist for the album. This might be a very long string! It's probably better to create an AlbumArtist tag with the value you want to appear in the Artist index and the control point.

(15-08-2012 15:39)bubbleguuum Wrote: [ -> ]Not that compilation doesn't imply an AlbumArtist tag. Take for example a "best of" Sting where every track has Artist = Sting. That's why compilations generally require a separate "COMPILATION" tag to mark them as such and to be able to display only compilations (subtree 4)

I don't understand why this needs to be a special tag. Isn't it just another Genre value that could be selected to view only your compilations? Does the COMPILATION tag have any semantics that are different from GENRE=Compilation?

(15-08-2012 22:32)simoncn Wrote: [ -> ]

(15-08-2012 15:39)bubbleguuum Wrote: [ -> ]Not that compilation doesn't imply an AlbumArtist tag. Take for example a "best of" Sting where every track has Artist = Sting. That's why compilations generally require a separate "COMPILATION" tag to mark them as such and to be able to display only compilations (subtree 4)

I don't understand why this needs to be a special tag. Isn't it just another Genre value that could be selected to view only your compilations? Does the COMPILATION tag have any semantics that are different from GENRE=Compilation?

Well there's no real standard to flag compilations. I personnaly use a custom COMPILATION TXXX frame with value 1, written by foobar2000 when I tag my files.

But there is also a more widespread itunescompilation tag stored in a TCMP frame.

See there for more info:
http://forums.mp3tag.de/lofiversion/inde...13266.html

I would presonnaly avoid using genre=compilation to flag compilations as "compilation" is not a genre.

(15-08-2012 22:48)bubbleguuum Wrote: [ -> ]Well there's no real standard to flag compilations. I personnaly use a custom COMPILATION TXXX frame with value 1, written by foobar2000 when I tag my files.

But there is also a more widespread itunescompilation tag stored in a TCMP frame.

See there for more info:
http://forums.mp3tag.de/lofiversion/inde...13266.html

I would presonnaly avoid using genre=compilation to flag compilations as "compilation" is not a genre.

Thanks for the pointer to TCMP. The TCMP frame is unofficial and not part of the ID3v2 standard. See this page. However, if it's written by iTunes, there's some case for MinimServer supporting it.

I'm aware that iTunes has special rules for how contributing artists are treated on "compilation" albums. Do you think an album tagged with TXXX COMPILATION=1 should trigger this special iTunes treatment? If not, do you think TXXX COMPILATION=1 should have any special semantics in MinimServer compared with (for example) TXXX COLLECTION=1?

(16-08-2012 06:30)simoncn Wrote: [ -> ]Thanks for the pointer to TCMP. The TCMP frame is unofficial and not part of the ID3v2 standard. See this page. However, if it's written by iTunes, there's some case for MinimServer supporting it.

Yes, since itunes is so widespread it is a good idea to be compatible with its tagging

(16-08-2012 06:30)simoncn Wrote: [ -> ]I'm aware that iTunes has special rules for how contributing artists are treated on "compilation" albums. Do you think an album tagged with TXXX COMPILATION=1 should trigger this special iTunes treatment? If not, do you think TXXX COMPILATION=1 should have any special semantics in MinimServer compared with (for example) TXXX COLLECTION=1?

I'm not sure how many people use a custom TXXX frame to identify compilations. Eventually you can add an option to configure the TXXX name that holds that info for the rare user who use it.
The foobar2000 discogs tagging plugin (that I wrote) will at least make use of it and will write TXXX COMPILATION=1 when appropriate.

(16-08-2012 09:49)bubbleguuum Wrote: [ -> ]I'm not sure how many people use a custom TXXX frame to identify compilations. Eventually you can add an option to configure the TXXX name that holds that info for the rare user who use it.
The foobar2000 discogs tagging plugin (that I wrote) will at least make use of it and will write TXXX COMPILATION=1 when appropriate.

I still don't understand why MinimServer would need to do something for a TXXX COMPILATION=1 frame that's different from what it would do for any other TXXX frame. To put this another way, what semantics would MinimServer attach to a "compilation" album that it wouldn't attach to any other album?