AlbumArtist Issues - creates more Albums

[Pastim]

I have a solution to my, and possibly others, dilemma regarding multiple AlbumArtist tags.

If it meets with the approval of the powers that be it might be useful to include something like it in the user guide, for obstinate people such as myself who still insist that multiple AlbumArtists can and do exist and should be separate, also suiting the behaviour of some other music servers.

I have created a new tag, just for MinimServer. I call it MinimAlbumArtist. It contains a concatenated set of AlbumArtist tags (in mp3tag and puddletag this is an action on tag MinimAlbumArtist to format it as:

Code:

$meta_sep(albumartist,; )

In MinimServer, the relevant properties are:

Code:

aliasTags - AlbumArtist:MainArtist,MinimAlbumArtist:AlbumArtist
indexTags - MainArtist:AlbumArtist .....
itemTags - MinimAlbumArtist, AlbumArtistSort.......
tagValue - MainArtist.value.sort={AlbumArtistSort}....
tagCustom -  MainArtist.displayRole={artist}, all.display.multiTag .....

So the real, multiple, AlbumArtist tags are now MainArtist tags, but displayed as AlbumArtists. I can have a many as I like, and use the menu to select any one of these AlbumArtists, just like other servers.

However, minimserver now has no AlbumArtist to use to tie one set of tracks with different sets of Artists together from different folders, and therefore miscounts single and multi-disc Albums as a result.

By using MinimAlbumArtist, now aliased as AlbumArtist, but not used as an index tag (so not visible), minimserver is happy. It has a unique AlbumArtist and counts Albums correctly.

This has bothered me on an off for a very long time. It bothered me even more when I started to look at using the Group tag, which expects a consistent set of tracks across multiple discs in one Album. So I was forced to think again about a solution to keep both my brain and minimserver happy at the same time.