Conflicting album artist values

[bbrip]

(23-06-2012 17:58)simoncn Wrote:  I've heard it said that the AlbumArtist is the artist under which the CD would be filed in a record store.

As those stores have largely vanished, no more need for that definition

Seriously: Why not provide that tag with a "new" live. There is no logical reason whatsoever why not more than one entry should be allowed here.

(23-06-2012 17:58)simoncn Wrote:  I can think of two approaches for doing this.

Option 1:

Add support for custom sorting without changing how the artist name appears in the tag. So the tag
ARTIST=Anne-Sophie Mutter
woould be sorted under M in a list of artists. The name would appear as Anne-Sophie Mutter in the Artist and All Artists index and on the control point.

The sort order would be decided using a combination of rules and exceptions. For example, a "last name first" rule would create a sort key that starts with the last word (blank-separated). For cases where this rule would produce the wrong result, you'd be able to define individual exceptions for specific artists.

Option 2:

The artist would need to be tagged as last name first, and this would be transformed for presentation. So a tag of
ARTIST=Mutter, Anne-Sophie
would be sorted exactly as it's written, and would be transformed to "Anne-Sophie Mutter" when it's sent to the control point and possibly when it's displayed in the Artist and Alll Artists indexes. The transformation only needs to look for the first comma, and there's no need for custom exceptions.

The first approach uses ARTIST tags in the usual format found in downloads and music databases, but is more complex to implement in the server because of the need for user-defined exceptions. The second approach requires a different style of ARTIST tags, but is easier for the server to implement.

Option 2 sounds definitely like the more logical one to me. Solves all the "exception" coding issues: Everything that follows after the comma is the 'First Name'.
so: "Karajan, Herbert von" will show as "Herbert von Karajan" in the control point. Sounds great to me!

Cheers
bbrip