Using Artist where AlbumArtist is not set?

[Korny]

Hi folks,

I want to be able display my music by Album Artist - but I have quite a lot of albums which only have an "Artist" tag. Generally I've used "AlbumArtist" for music where individual tracks are not all by the main Artist, but I prefer to look at the music by the "main" artist.

For example, I have an album by "Bliss N Eso" but it has tracks by "Bliss N Eso feat. Nas" - so here I have an Album Artist tag. (This is also useful for compilations where a band changed name or members, e.g. "Sting and the Police" has Album Artist of "Sting" for convenience)

At the moment I have my IndexTags set to include "Artist" and "AlbumArtist" - but "AlbumArtist" is only showing albums where I've explicitly set that tag. Is there some way to set that index to fall back to "Artist" for tracks that have no "AlbumArtist" tag?

(The "Artist" index is almost useless, because it shows every variant of every individual artist, plus all the compilations and collections. I think it lists 700+ artists. If I could filter by "Artists with at least 5 tracks" that would also work, but at the moment it's a mess)

[simoncn]

The Artist index shows the AlbumArtist for albums that have an AlbumArtist tag and the Artist tag(s) for albums that don't have an AlbumArtist tag. This sounds like what you want and I'm not sure why the results are as you describe. Are you sure you aren't looking at the All Artists index, which shows all artists for all tracks?

[Korny]

(02-05-2018 21:20)simoncn Wrote:  The Artist index shows the AlbumArtist for albums that have an AlbumArtist tag and the Artist tag(s) for albums that don't have an AlbumArtist tag. This sounds like what you want and I'm not sure why the results are as you describe. Are you sure you aren't looking at the All Artists index, which shows all artists for all tracks?

I'm using the "AlbumArtist" index, which I had to add to the defaults.

The Artist index seems to show the Artist index for all music, irrespective of whether there's an AlbumArtist tag or not. At least that's what it looked like - I'll double check.

(I'm using BubbleUPNP as my client)

[Korny]

Ah - I see, the problem isn't that it's ignoring AlbumArtist - that bit is working, if I browse Artist I get the AlbumArtist if there is one.

The problem it turns out is that I have too many compilations with "Various Artists" but no actual AlbumArtist tag - and those show up split across all the individual artists. So I see "Blink 182" on the list, with 4 albums, as there are 4 compilations with Blink 182 tracks in them.

And I can see why that's the preferred behaviour, for most users. I just want a way to browse my albums by artist, without seeing all the various compilations and the like, making the artist list massive. I could always set an AlbumArtist tag of something like "Various Artists" for each compilation, I guess. Though that seems not quite right too. Hmm.

[simoncn]

I think it would make sense to set Various Artists as the AlbumArtist for your compilations. As well as solving the Artist index problem, it gives you a quick way to get a list of all your compilation albums and browse them by track artist (using the All Artist index).