Revisiting the Artist and All Artists Index

[paultaylor]

(24-11-2023 16:11)simbun Wrote:  I was actually thinking of the tagging standards themselves (FLAC Artist/ID3 TPE1 e.t.c.), but yes they're obviously dependent upon MinimServer handling them.

Right, I did wonder that but I am sure you are incorrect about that.

FLAC allows you to store multiple separate values for any tag including ARTIST and ALBUMARTIST

ID3v24 allows you to store multiple null separated values for most text frames including TPE1 (ARTIST) and TPE2 (ALBUMARTIST)

There is no difference between what can be stored in Artist and what can be stored in AlbumArtist at a tagging level. But most taggers tend to write just one (concatenated) value whether there are multiple (album) artists or not to both ARTIST and ALBUMARTIST. There are good reasons for this:

1- Many music players only support reading first value
2- Difficult to break multiple artists into separate artists
3- If store artists separately lose joining words such as Ft, with etc

There is a difference at MinimServer level, it does not support multiple albumartist values because it makes it harder to identify albums. Although I cannot see any logical reason why it could not be done, only a implementation, additional effort argument for not allowing it.

SongKong does both, writes one value (e.g 'Johnny Cash & June Carter') to ARTIST and ALBUMARTIST,. but writes multiple values (e.g 'Johnny Cash', 'June Carter') to ARTIST and ALBUMARTISTS tag, so you have all options at your disposal.