feature request : handling instruments and instrumentists

[eseb63]

Hello,

I am a bit surprised not finding an Instrument tag within the "special" tags handled by minimserver.

Works are written for instruments, artists plays an (or several) instrument(s), so the instrument has a great place in classical music tagging (and others).

As minimserver is very flexible, it's easy to add an INSTRUMENT tag in indextags : it allows browsing different ways :
- which albums with this instrument ?
- which works with this instrument ?
- which genres with this instrument ?
- which composers with this instrument ?

But when browsing by artists, i don't have the expected result : i would expect a list of artists playing this instrument (and only them) but i get all artists involved in an album having track(s) with this instrument tag.

If i choose the piano, i get the pianists, but also conductors (for the piano concertos), other soloists as violinists or cellists (for piano chamber music) ...

I guess the generic approach can't handle that : it would need special coding to handle the many to many relationship between instruments, artists and tracks.

In Musichi, this relation is handled at track level with an artist tag on this form "ArtistName[Instrument_name]".

Might handling this kind of artist tag be an enhancement in a next version ?

Thanks in advance for the reply

[simoncn]

You could create an ArtistInstrument tag and set this tag this to values with the format ArtistName[Instrument_name]. You could then browse your library using the ArtistInstrument index which will show ArtistName[Instrument_name] values for your current browsing selection.

Your files would need to contain Artist tags as well as ArtistInstrument tags. Some tagging programs provide scripting capabliities that should enable you to generate Artist tags matching your ArtistInstrument tags.

[eseb63]

i realize my first post was a bit confusing : when i said :

(14-02-2025 19:27)eseb63 Wrote:  But when browsing by artists, i don't have the expected result : i would expect a list of artists playing this instrument (and only them) but i get all artists involved in an album having track(s) with this instrument tag.

i meant after selecting an instrument (like the 4 examples i gave just before)

so, having 2 artist indexes instead of one just duplicates the issue.

the issue doesn't occur when browsing by artist (or artist-instrument), but when browsing by instrument.

example: Beethoven triple concerto

indextags : INSTRUMENT, ARTIST, ARTIST-INSTRUMENT

tracks :
tag INSTRUMENT : Piano, Violin, Cello, Orchestra
tag ARTIST : Richter, Sviatoslav; Oistrakh, David; Rostropovich, Mstislav; Karajan, Herbert von
tag ARTIST-INSTRUMENT : Richter, Sviatoslav[Piano]; Oistrakh, David[Violin]; Rostropovich, Mstislav[Cello]; Karajan, Herbert von[Orchestra]

if i browse by instrument and select "Piano" :

• if i select Artist, i get all four while i would expect only "Richter, Sviatoslav"
• if i select Artist-Instrument, i get all four while i would expect only "Richter, Sviatoslav[Piano]"
  

i hope it's clearer this way...

[simoncn]

Thanks for providing this clarification and example.

The selection you want could be provided by a UPnP Search request. For example, the search query could be something like this:

upnp:class = object.container.musicArtist and upnp:artist[@role="artist-instrument"] contains "[Piano]"

A number of UPnP control points (including Kazoo) implement UPnP Search but only with a fixed set of simple search queries. They don't allow the user to specify custom search queries like the above.

[simoncn]

Another approach would be to use a tagging program script to create Artist-Piano tags (etc.) from the Artist-Instrument tags in the files. For example, the tag

ARTIST-INSTRUMENT : Richter, Sviatoslav[Piano]; Oistrakh, David[Violin]; Rostropovich, Mstislav[Cello]; Karajan, Herbert von[Orchestra]

could be replaced with these tags:

ARTIST-PIANO : Richter, Sviatoslav
ARTIST-VIOLIN: Oistrakh, David
ARTIST-CELLO: Rostropovich, Mstislav
ARTIST-ORCHESTRA; Karajan, Herbert von

This would enable you to browse by Instrument > Piano > Artist-Piano to see a list of piano artists only.

[eseb63]

(17-02-2025 12:04)simoncn Wrote:  The selection you want could be provided by a UPnP Search request.
A number of UPnP control points (including Kazoo) implement UPnP Search but only with a fixed set of simple search queries.

indeed, i already made some tests about upnp-search with Kazoo and Lumin (a bit better), but their use of upnp-search is too limited ; moreover, I am looking for a browsing solution rather than a searching one.

[eseb63]

(17-02-2025 12:39)simoncn Wrote:  Another approach would be to use a tagging program script to create Artist-Piano tags (etc.) from the Artist-Instrument tags in the files.
...
...
This would enable you to browse by Instrument > Piano > Artist-Piano to see a list of piano artists only.

This approach would require creating as many tags as instruments used in the classical music collection. I would like a generic solution.

no way that MinimServer handles this internally?

[simoncn]

I don't think MinimServer will be able to provide a generic solution for browsing based on tags with values that contain multiple items of information. This would be a very major change to how MinimServer currently works.

[eseb63]

i said a generic solution for the tags, to avoid having to create as many tags as instruments in the collection.

but i didn't mean a generic solution for minimserver : minimserver handles by default some entities like Album, AlbumArtist, Artist, Composer, Genre and several others but not instrument, while instrument is, conceptually speaking, in relation with composer, artist, work, genre, track...

so, the need is just to add this missing feature, the handling of which could be specific ?

[simoncn]

MinimServer treats all tags the same for indexing purposes, with some special processing of the combination of AlbumArtist and Artist when creating the Artist index. Album is special because it is used to group tracks within an album. Other tags including Composer and Genre have no special treatment. In no case does MinimServer attempt to parse the contents of a tag value and give special semantics to these contents.