Multidisc albums with more than one artist

[simoncn]

(22-10-2013 19:32)zebra Wrote:  All files have the album artist "James Newton Howard". All files from disc 1 and 2 and most files from disc 3 have the artist "James Newton Howard". On disc 3 there are also some files tagged with artist "Brad Dechter" (some source music used in the film, written by the orchestrator).

For this case, the current MinimServer behaviour of merging by AlbumArtist would do exactly what you want, except that you have aliased AlbumArtist to something else and this prevents MinimServer from using your AlbumArtist tags to do the merging.

Quote:All the files are tagged with "Hans Zimmer" and "James Newton Howard" as artist but also as album artist because usually I browse my music collection via the album artist (= film music composers). If I browse my collection by artist I would also have many other artist in the artist list (from songs, source music, music "inspired by" or whatever).

For this case, you will need to continue to use tagAlias to rename your multiple AlbumArtist tags to something else. To enable correct merging, you would also need to add some other tag that you can alias to AlbumArtist. This other tag would be used for merging purposes only and wouldn't appear in the index.

For a future release of MinimServer, I am considering adding a new capability to create a default value for the AlbumArtist tag (and possibly other tags) from other tag values in the same file. You could take advantage of this by doing the following:

1) Use tagAlias to rename your AlbumArtist tags to something else, for example MainArtist.

2) Use the new default value capability to create an AlbumArtist value from an ordered sequence of your MainArtist values. For The Dark Knight, this would create a default AlbumArtist value of 'Hans Zimmer, James Newton Howard'.

3) These default values would enable both the above albums to be merged correctly, assuming that all the tracks of the album have the same sequence of AlbumArtist tags in the same order.