Behavior of Artist tag

[simoncn]

I think I can explain what's happening. It's a combination of a bug, a feature, and the way you've done your tagging.

To see a listing of Artist tag values with nothing else mixed in, you need to put All Artists in indexTags. This will give you a All Artists index selection, which will show every individual artist that appears in an Artist tag. If you select one of these artists, you'll see all the tracks that contain an Artist tag for that artist (and maybe other Artist tags as well).

The mixed-in artist computation works as follows:

For a track, you get all the values of the Conductor tag (if present), then all the values of the Artist tag (if present), then all the values of the Orchestra tag (if present). All duplicates are supposed to be eliminated, but I made a change in 0.50 that has the accidental side-effect of only eliminating duplicates for values in the same category (Conductor/Artist/Orchestra). This means that if Ton Koopman is tagged as both Conductor and Artist (very reasonable, as he is both of these), you'll see his name twice in the computed mixed-in artist value. This is a bug, and I'll fix it in the next release of MinimServer.

For an album, you get the AlbumArtist value if that's present. If not, you get all the Conductor values for all the tracks (if present), then all the Artist values for all the tracks (if present), then all the Orchestra values for all the tracks (if present). Again, duplicates should be eliminated, but because of the bug they'll only be eliminated to values in the same category.

The Artist index contains all the (possibly mixed-in) track artist values. So, when I've fixed the bug, you'll see:

Ton Koopman
Ton Koopman, Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra
Ton Koopman, Tini Mathot

You should see Tini Mathot (on her own) in the All Artists list. She'll only be in the Artist list if she appears on her own for a track. If she always appears with other people, her name will be combined with those other people in the Artist list.

I hope this helps! Does this approach (when the bug is fixed) seem reasonable?