Revisiting the Artist and All Artists Index

[paultaylor]

(24-11-2023 11:08)simbun Wrote:  Apologies if what was meant as a quick, by the way, turned into a lengthy back and forth of little value.

Okay, thanks but I dont think we need to discuss further in this thread.

(24-11-2023 11:08)simbun Wrote:  Multiple track artists are fine as the standard Artist tag is multi-value so that doesn't cause a problem.

I take it you simply mean by this that MinimServer has no restrictions on storing multiple values in an Artist tag, so we an store separate multiple values in the Artist tag (though in my case they are stored in Artists tag and then aliased to the Artist tag) ?

(24-11-2023 11:08)simbun Wrote:  I'm wondering whether you're splitting groups like 'Diana Ross & The Supremes' or 'Bob Marley & The Wailers' as I clearly have a lot more of those, but they're groups in their own right, so aren't independent artists - for these projects.

No, I split them according to how they are stored in MusicBrainz as album artist credits, so here we see Bob Marley & The Wailers is a single credit. Whereas Barcelona by Freddie Mercury & Montserrat Caballé is clearly two separate artists and stored in MusicBrainz as two artist credits.

[simbun]

(24-11-2023 13:31)paultaylor Wrote:  

(24-11-2023 11:08)simbun Wrote:  Multiple track artists are fine as the standard Artist tag is multi-value so that doesn't cause a problem.

I take it you simply mean by this that MinimServer has no restrictions on storing multiple values in an Artist tag, so we an store separate multiple values in the Artist tag (though in my case they are stored in Artists tag and then aliased to the Artist tag) ?

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.

(24-11-2023 13:31)paultaylor Wrote:  

(24-11-2023 11:08)simbun Wrote:  I'm wondering whether you're splitting groups like 'Diana Ross & The Supremes' or 'Bob Marley & The Wailers' as I clearly have a lot more of those, but they're groups in their own right, so aren't independent artists - for these projects.

No, I split them according to how they are stored in MusicBrainz as album artist credits, so here we see Bob Marley & The Wailers is a single credit. Whereas Barcelona by Freddie Mercury & Montserrat Caballé is clearly two separate artists and stored in MusicBrainz as two artist credits.

That makes sense, then we're using the same data.

[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.

[simbun]

I realise that anything is possible in Vorbis, I meant that the standard for the Artist tag is multivalue across all the tagging formats - not that it helps much when even systems like Sonos and BluOS choose not to support them!

I didn't realise ID3v2.4 had officially opened up multi-value album artists (and other tags more generally). I didn't get beyond 2.3 with ID3 as it was/is such a messy standard. As soon as all my devices supported FLAC and Ogg Vorbis I moved on.

[paultaylor]

(25-11-2023 10:46)simbun Wrote:  I meant that the standard for the Artist tag is multivalue across all the tagging formats

Well I dont know where you got that from, Im not aware of any standard that allows multiple values for artist but not album artist.

[simoncn]

The ID3v2.3 spec allows this for TPE1 (artist, separated with '/') but not TPE2 (album artist).

[paultaylor]

(25-11-2023 13:52)simoncn Wrote:  The ID3v2.3 spec allows this for TPE1 (artist, separated with '/') but not TPE2 (album artist).

This is probably right intepretation, from the ID3v23 spec

Quote:TPE1
The ‘Lead artist(s)/Lead performer(s)/Soloist(s)/Performing group’ is used for the main artist(s). They are seperated with the “/” character.
TPE2
The ‘Band/Orchestra/Accompaniment’ frame is used for additional information about the performers in the recording.

TPE2 doesnt even define the concept of an album artist, but it has been used for as that for a long time. But since ID2v24 support multiple strings for all text frames

Quote:The text information frames are often the most important frames, containing information like artist, album and more. There may only be one text information frame of its kind in an tag. All text information frames supports multiple strings, stored as a null separated list, where null is reperesented by the termination code for the charater encoding. All text frame identifiers begin with “T”. Only text frame identifiers begin with “T”, with the exception of the “TXXX” frame. All the text information frames have the following format:

and it was released way back in November 1, 2000

So this restriction of IDv23 does not need to drive current thinking.

[keithsonic]

I have just imported over 3k artist images into indexArtwork from LastFM via JRiver. I had a success rate of about 95% with most mismatches due to differences in how artist names are presented. However, I have two intractable problems I can’t resolve.
I have two discrete artists Chelsea Wolf and Chelsea Wolfe, both in separate folders and correctly tagged in album artist. However, MS shows the latter image for both artists.
More intriguingly I have separate folders for Christine McVie and as her maiden name Perfect yet MS shows the McVie image in both cases.
All metadata is tagged in JRiver and this shows the correct images in both cases. All images are jpgs so I am stumped.
Any suggestions.

[simoncn]

I suspect there are incorrect tags lurking somewhere in your files. Have you tried checking the Artist index, the AlbumArtist index and the All Artists index? What artist names and images do you see in each of these?

[keithsonic]

(16-09-2024 17:33)simoncn Wrote:  I suspect there are incorrect tags lurking somewhere in your files. Have you tried checking the Artist index, the AlbumArtist index and the All Artists index? What artist names and images do you see in each of these?

Thanks Simon - I noticed that images are correctly displayed in bubbleupnp on my Android phone but not in dCS Mosaic on my iPad. Clearing the cache on the latter has resolved the problem.
On a related note the LastFM import function on JRiver returns images for all artists including track artists. I therefore have ended up with 10k+ images in my indexArtwork folder which may explain the caching issue. I can’t see any obvious way to remove redundant images that MS does not use, unless you have a smart suggestion.