Feature Request: Tag Update Tag Referencing

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(10-09-2017 15:00)antonmb Wrote:  Then the other simple alternative is to put the composer in the album artist field for classical. All the performers can go in either a performer or soloists field. For classical, I have the following fields;
AlbumArtist (composer in last name, first name format)
Conductor
Orchestra
Soloists

I leave track artist blank because I also use portable players which don't show composer but do sort by track artist, so it can be quite difficult of the track artist field is loaded with performers and conductors - but this field can of course be used for soloists, conductor, etc.

In the long run it pays to do the work of cleaning and correcting tags to your preferences, since the information that comes from the internet databases is often such a mess.

This seems a novel way to use AlbumArtist but I’m not sure it’ll help my cause. Generally you want to make sure AlbumArtist is constant (one value) for an album where different artists perform on different tracks if you want to have MinimServer display that album as one album. I have recently ripped The Art of Alfred Deller, in which there are a few accompanying performers on different tracks and even more composers represented. If I don’t put “Alfred Deller” in the AlbumArtist tag, then MinimServer shows the album as multiple albums, according to the number of unique Artist combinations encountered (I can’t remember how many exactly as I’m not at home at present to check). If I were to put the composer for each track in the AlbumArtist, surely this would fragment the album even more and show it as n albums, where n is the number of composers represented on the whole album?

I agree that accuracy in tagging is paramount but taking care of my classical collection already takes up a lot of time. The “due diligence” required of other music must sadly wait. This is why I thought the cleverness of MinimServer’s Tag Update feature might come to the rescue for now as I dared to hope that a variable assignment (i.e. tag on the right of the equals sign in the update file) might not be a huge leap from the current limitation of constant assignment. For now, I can still “solve” my problem by creating a duplicate composer tag for all my classical files with a new name and putting that in the Title tagFormat string. It’s just a bit cumbersome and involves a lot of redundancy.