(23-06-2012 13:36)bbrip Wrote: [ -> ]I am still not sure on what the ALBUMARTIST tag is really worth if it is limited to 1 artist... Albums can have more than one Albumartist - its beyond me....
I've heard it said that the AlbumArtist is the artist under which the CD would be filed in a record store.
It the CD has a single artist, AlbumArtist and Artist are equivalent. If the CD has many tracks with different artists (perhaps a compilation of recordings by various different artists), the AlbumArtist might be something like Various Artists.
Personally I haven't found much use for AlbumArtist, but there are some people who use it a lot.
Quote:I'll set up a testbed and play around with some custom tags but wont embark on any major overhaul of my tagging standards for my "real live" audioserver quite yet. AT least I'd need some features in the server that translate Firstname Lastname into Lastname, Firstname reliably. Not an easy task because it needs to take proper care of the "von" and "van" and "d'" and "de" and "del" and "di" and "du" and... and... and.... On the other hand "Mc" and Mac" are part of the last name. oouuffff
Anyway thanks for providing food for thought.
bbrip
I can think of two approaches for doing this.
Option 1:
Add support for custom sorting without changing how the artist name appears in the tag. So the tag
ARTIST=Anne-Sophie Mutter
woould be sorted under M in a list of artists. The name would appear as Anne-Sophie Mutter in the Artist and All Artists index and on the control point.
The sort order would be decided using a combination of rules and exceptions. For example, a "last name first" rule would create a sort key that starts with the last word (blank-separated). For cases where this rule would produce the wrong result, you'd be able to define individual exceptions for specific artists.
Option 2:
The artist would need to be tagged as last name first, and this would be transformed for presentation. So a tag of
ARTIST=Mutter, Anne-Sophie
would be sorted exactly as it's written, and would be transformed to "Anne-Sophie Mutter" when it's sent to the control point and possibly when it's displayed in the Artist and Alll Artists indexes. The transformation only needs to look for the first comma, and there's no need for custom exceptions.
The first approach uses ARTIST tags in the usual format found in downloads and music databases, but is more complex to implement in the server because of the need for user-defined exceptions. The second approach requires a different style of ARTIST tags, but is easier for the server to implement.