AlbumArtist Issues - creates more Albums

[Pastim]

(27-09-2014 12:11)simoncn Wrote:  If I understand this correctly, if you choose to use an AlbumArtist tag or tags for any track in an album, these tag(s) would appear on every track of the album, presumably in the same order. Because an identical list of AlbumArtist tags appears on every track in the album, converting this list of tags to a "match key" string would correctly match all tracks of the album.

MinimServer could adopt such a scheme and this would work for your library. The problem I envisage is that many libraries would have some tracks in an album where one of the album artists isn't tagged (perhaps because he/she isn't playing on that track) and this would cause unexpected match failures.

This is exactly what happens if I don't use an alias for AlbumArtist, isn't it? I cannot guarantee the order of multi-value tags, since that depends on how the tagging software processes my entries (eg entered as Richter\\Fischer-Dieskau). I hope it preserves the order but cannot be 100% sure.

I suggested adding an extra optional tag to the multiFolderAlbum property so that for all existing users there would be no change at all, and the matching issue you mention will remain. For those that have a puzzle like mine, the rules would change to use that tag instead of AlbumArtist, so would read something like:

"When merging folder album contents, MinimServer checks for all of the following:

- The album names are the same, excluding any [disc <n>] or (disc <n>) suffix
- The artist values are the same. (These values are either the contents of the optional tag on the multiFolderAlbum property if defined and present else the AlbumArtist tag values if present else the Artist tag values if they are the same for all audio files in the folder album.)
- The folder match filters (if present) are the same. A match filter is an optional suffix of the form ['<filter>'] that can be appended to a folder name."

As I said, the only reason I use an alias at all is because of the (to me still slightly odd) handling of AlbumArtist when it has multiple values and I try to use it as an index.

However, if I'm the only person to have this problem, please don't do any work on it unless you think others might benefit as well. Whilst minimserver really is a great system, it isn't my main server (I use LMS/Squeezebox most of the time).