AlbumArtist Issues - creates more Albums

[Pastim]

(26-09-2014 22:38)simoncn Wrote:  From your experience, how do other servers that don't have this "problem" merge tracks in different folders that belong to the same album and are tagged with different artists and different album artists? Do they merge by matching the album name only? This would lead to false positives with tracks from different albums being merged incorrectly.

With foobar2000, LMS and Bliss, provided the Album and all AlbumArtist tags are the same, and the discnumber and track numbers are consistent (and in some case the disctotal or totaldiscs line up) then all tracks are treated as belonging to 1 album. All report the same number of albums, now I have taken care to ensure all albums have one or more AlbumArtist tags, even for compilations where I use 'Various'. I am not aware of any logic link to the Artist tags (and I mean just that tag, not any wider meaning of Artist). There may be further tricks where AlbumArtist is absent or the compilation tag is set, but I don't know about that - sorry. It is certainly true that where AlbumArtist is different they tend to count differently.

Minimserver works in almost the same way counting my albums if I keep the AlbumArtist tag under its real name (although it still counts slightly differently), but the search by AlbumArtist goes awry where there is more than one.

I have a suggestion to make which would hopefully not be too hard to implement. Could one add an optional tag field to the mergeFolderAlbums property, such as:

Code:

mergeFolderAlbums      true,tag

where 'tag' is the field the user wants to use as being common to all Albums in place of AlbumArtist? This would default to AlbumArtist if omitted, leaving all functionality as it is now. In my case, I would put MainArtist (the alias I use to get around the multiple value issue), so the server would use the one or more tags under that name on each track.

In fact I have another bespoke tag that would also work for me. I added the catalogue number in a tag I called setId. I did this before I discovered MusicBrainz, which I has it's own variant on this (see https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Release/Catalog_Number).

The reason I have multiple AlbumArtist tags on some albums is that for some, e.g. a lieder recital, the singer and pianist are of equal importance to me, and I want to find the album for one or the other.

Regards