MinimServer Forum

Hello!
I recently updated my Netgear Pro4 NAS to minimserver2. While at it, I got an idea. Using the album artist tag for something useful. In my collection, I only use the artist tag, except for compilations where I use Various as a tag for album artist. Elsewhere album artist is blank.

I want to use the album artist tag to show the performers in my jazz albums.
I saw this on the forum: To add performer information to album artist names, add this to tagFormat:

AlbumArtist.displayFormat={$albumartist^$performer^; }

Now that sounded promising! But nothing showed so I added
aliasTags = AlbumArtist:Performer

That worked fine, BUT when browsing Artist it now show All Artists, even the artists from compilations! Artist and All Artists are the same.

How can I resolve this issue? I use mconnect on an iPad btw.

I can not post my config as I get an error...

You cannot use AlbumArtist in the way you are trying to do. As you have discovered, AlbumArtist has a special meaning for the contents of the Artist index as well as some other special meanings. Also, you cannot have more than one AlbumArtist value for an album.

Instead, you should be able to add Performer tags for your performers. Which tagging program are you using?

Thank you for answering!
Well it kind of works, using separators between every performer in the albumartist tag. Like: John Coltrane, ts;;;Dizzy Gillespie, tr;;;Elvin Jones, dr
I use one albumartist tag with separators.

mconnect shows the Performers, but the Artist is Allartists.
I use two taggingapps: Yate and Kid3. I am on macos Mojave.
Btw, Yate uses the ;;; separator, Kid3 uses a pipe.

Is there some reason why you don't want to use a Performer tag but use AlbumArtist instead? Yate should be able to create a Performer tag with multiple values.

I will try the performer tag tonight, I don’t have any reason to use the AlbumArtist tag other then compilations. Thanks for the advice.

Well I have now tried the Performer tag instead of using AlbumArtist. It don't work consistently. If I make a Performer tag in Yate, and save, it works great in both Picard and Kid3 too. However, when I reopen the file in Yate it screws up the formatting in a weird way, very strange. It would then be full of errors.
What I would like is to use the "classic" way of notating Jazz Performers:
Mr X, ts
Mr Y, tr
Mr Z, b
and so on. Name, instrument. Simple enough. But Yate do not like that at all. Yate uses some odd way displaying musician credits...

I have checked this. Unfortunately Yate isn't treating Performer as a normal tag containing a text string, so you will need to use a different tag name. PerformerInfo should be fine. You can add PerformerInfo:Performer to the MinimServer aliasTags property so that MinimServer treats this as a Performer tag for indexing and tag formatting.

Thanks for checking. Yes, I tried PerformerInfo and it worked fine! However, I did some research and found that MUSICIAN CREDITS is a good tag for this purpose. Now Flac files works perfectly with this tag with ;;; as a separator between items in Yate. However my mp3 files do not like this separator. I have tried | and ; and they don't work either. I am almost there, need to do some more research...