Genre tagging: using available tag and order sorting

[simoncn]

Thanks for explaining how you use multiple AlbumArtist values and why they are important for you. I understand this and I will first propose a simple solution and then give some background into why MinimServer works the way it does.

The simple solution is to set these MinimServer property values:

aliasTags: AlbumArtist:AlbumArtists
tagFormat: AlbumArtist.displayFormat={$albumartists}
indexTags: remove AlbumArtist (if currently set) and add AlbumArtists:AlbumArtist

The aliasTags setting changes the tag name for your AlbumArtist tags to AlbumArtists. The tags in your files are still AlbumArtist but MinimServer reads the files as if they contained AlbumArtists tags instead of AlbumArtist tags. This prevents any errors for multiple AlbumArtist values.

The new tagFormat setting creates a "virtual" AlbumArtist tag whose display value is a combination of all the tagged album artist names. The new indexTags setting creates an index shown as AlbumArtist whose values are the names that are tagged as AlbumArtist in your files. For example, if an album has tagged AlbumArtist values Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington, the album artist shown in your control point's artist display will be "Ella Fizgerald, Duke Ellington" and the AlbumArtist index will contain two separate index entries "Ella Fizgerald" and "Duke Ellington" with the album listed under both of these. As I understand it, this is exactly what you would like to see.

Now for the background. In the early days of MinimServer, there was much discussion about how Artist tags and AlbumArtist tags should be used and should be handled by MinimServer. The consensus was that the AlbumArtist value is the overall artist for the album and the Artist values are all artists that contribute to the album. As a result of this, it was decided that the MinimServer index would provide the following index values:

Artist: the single AlbumArtist tag value for the album if there is one and all the Artist tag values otherwise
All Artists: all the Artist tag values
AlbumArtist: the single AlbumArtist tag value

As well as its use for indexing as described above, the AlbumArtist tag is used by MinimServer to locate and combine audio files belonging to an album if the mergeFolderAlbums option is enabled. With this option, MinimServer scans the whole library looking for files that are part of the same album based on rules that involve AlbumArtist and Artist tag values (see this section of the user guide). The way this matching is implemented is quite complex and allowing multiple AlbumArtist values would increase this complexity considerably and would produce incorrect results if all the AlbumArtist values are not completely consistent in all cases.