Revisiting the Artist and All Artists Index

[simoncn]

(21-11-2023 12:53)paultaylor Wrote:  

(21-11-2023 12:35)simoncn Wrote:  Both the above approaches do the same for album artists.

Hang on I wasnt suggesting both of these approach for Album Artist I had settled on

aliasTags:Album_artists:Album Artists
indexTags:Album_Artists.default={AlbumArtist}

You are saying exactly what I was saying, that the album artist settings in your two suggested combinations of configuration settings are identical.

Quote:Okay so I get this, and therefore for Artists option 1 is the correct approach ?

Yes

[simoncn]

(21-11-2023 12:44)paultaylor Wrote:  and therefore although I want to the two values to be indexed seperately I want to see Johnny Cash & June Carter when playing the album as this best matches the actual release.

Searching for either 'Cash" or "Carter" will return a match for the album artist value "Johnny Cash & June Carter" so it should not be an issue to use this value.

[paultaylor]

testing this all out I found didnt actually work it was still showing combined artists


aliasTags: Artists:-Artist
indexTags: All Artists:Artists


but changing to:

aliasTags: Artists:-Artist
indexTags: Artist:Artists


did work, which is better really, but why is this I thought All Artists index was based on the value of the Artist field which we modified using the alias ?

[paultaylor]

I refer you back to this line

simoncn Wrote:The AlbumArtist index (corresponding to AlbumArtist and/or Album Artist tags in the files) requires a single value that is consistent across all tracks of an album. If you have another field such as album_artists, this limitation does not apply.

Im confused what you meant by this. I thought you mean the AlbumArtist value should always contain the same single value for each song in album which would not be the case if I did aliasTags:album_artists:-albumartist

[simbun]

(21-11-2023 12:44)paultaylor Wrote:  

(21-11-2023 12:12)simbun Wrote:  When I tried it, not only did I want to see multiple album artists in an index, but I also wanted to see them when displaying albums (hence the use of .displayFormat)

Okay, that is not necessary for me because the two fields contain

Album Artists:
Johnny Cash
June Carter

Album Artist:
Johnny Cash & June Carter

I was close to suggesting that you simply concatenate the artists together, but it's something I discounted previously and I don't like to suggest solutions that I'm not happy with myself.

(21-11-2023 12:44)paultaylor Wrote:  

(21-11-2023 12:12)simbun Wrote:  and to appear in UPnP searches as AlbumArtists (all of which isn't possible).

Okay im using Kinsky because testing on PC and Kazoo works ureliably for me and this doesnt seem to have search, do you of a control point on the PC that supports search so I can try this out.

As @simoncn stated a UPnP search will match the concatenated albumartist string as well as other matches, so your 'Johnny Cash' result could look something like:

Johnny Cash
Johnny Cash & ...
Johnny Cash & June Carter
... & Johnny Cash

The problem being that you can't retrieve all his albums (or the album you're looking for unless you know the other albumartist), which may or may not be a deal-breaker as you can through the Album_Artists index.

[paultaylor]

(21-11-2023 13:33)simbun Wrote:  I was close to suggesting that you simply concatenate the artists together, but it's something I discounted previously and I don't like to suggest solutions that I'm not happy with myself.

Im not concantenating anything, that is simply the value stored on the album, for toher albums or songs the value may be include 'ft', 'with' ectera so I see no problem with displaying the album I cant quite see what you are getting at with this ?.

[simbun]

(21-11-2023 13:49)paultaylor Wrote:  

(21-11-2023 13:33)simbun Wrote:  I was close to suggesting that you simply concatenate the artists together, but it's something I discounted previously and I don't like to suggest solutions that I'm not happy with myself.

Im not concantenating anything, that is simply the value stored on the album, for toher albums or songs the value may be include 'ft', 'with' ectera so I see no problem with displaying the album I cant quite see what you are getting at with this ?.

So you take that approach with Artist too do you?

When I'm performing a UPnP search for an artist I'm expecting one artist result back (alongside all the other matches e.g. albumartist, tracks e.t.c) not as many unique results as they've had collaborations on.

Using Elton John as an example, the Artist results I'd get back from a UPnP search (were I to have it as a single string) would be:

Code:

2Pac · Elton John
Elton John
Elton John · Brandi Carlile
Elton John · Britney Spears
Elton John · Charlie Puth
Elton John · Dua Lipa
Elton John · Eddie Vedder
Elton John · France Gall
Elton John · George Michael
Elton John · John Lennon
Elton John · Kiki Dee
Elton John · Millie Jackson
Elton John · Ray Cooper
Elton John · SG Lewis
Elton John · Stevie Nicks
Elton John · Stevie Wonder
Elton John · Taron Egerton
Elton John · Years & Years
Elton John · Young Thug · Nicki Minaj
Eminem · Elton John
Fall Out Boy · Elton John
George Michael · Elton John
Glen Campbell · Elton John
Gorillaz · Elton John · 6LACK
Ironik · Chipmunk · Elton John
Jimmie Allen · Elton John
Lady Gaga · Elton John
Lil Nas X · Elton John
Miley Cyrus · WATT · Elton John · Yo‐Yo Ma · Robert Trujillo · Chad Smith
Ray Charles · Elton John
Rina Sawayama · Elton John
Surfaces · Elton John

I guess it depends if, and how you use search.

[paultaylor]

(21-11-2023 13:08)paultaylor Wrote:  testing this all out I found didnt actually work it was still showing combined artists


aliasTags: Artists:-Artist
indexTags: All Artists:Artists


but changing to:

aliasTags: Artists:-Artist
indexTags: Artist:Artists


did work, which is better really, but why is this I thought All Artists index was based on the value of the Artist field which we modified using the alias ?

I realized this made no sense since the Artist index is the special confusingly named index. I was using a large library on a melco which was a bit unwieldy to change and test things because of its size and slow speed of melco so I have now moved to running MnimServer on a Pc on a small library and for that


aliasTags: Artists:-Artist
indexTags: All Artists:Artists

does work as expected.

So sorry for confusion probaly something else causing the issue.

However, this does clearly highlight the problem with having these special Artist and All Artists index that are not defined clearly in the properties and cause confusion when you try to do something else.

[paultaylor]

(21-11-2023 13:33)simbun Wrote:  So you take that approach with Artist too do you?

I think we are talking at cross purposes here, and I need to find a control point with search to better engage with you.

[simoncn]

(21-11-2023 15:33)paultaylor Wrote:  However, this does clearly highlight the problem with having these special Artist and All Artists index that are not defined clearly in the properties and cause confusion when you try to do something else.

They are defined very clearly in the section of the user guide that you quoted at the start of this thread.