Still confused by Artist, Albumartist and ArtistSort

[Mangar]

Hi,

first I wish a Happy New Year to everyone!

I have mostly Albums by one artist and only a few compilation albums with many different artists. Beause of that I tagged my albums like the following example:

Artist: Gary Moore
AlbumArtist: Moore, Gary
ArtistSort: Moore, Gary

My tagOptions: Artist.reverseName.display, AlbumArtist.reverseName.display

Everything is fine this way.

But now I started to rip all of the CD's of my father and he has many compilations like this.

When I tag it automatically by MP3Tag with Musicbrainz as source, I get the following:

Artist: Clous van Mechelen
AlbumArtist: Various Artists
ArtistSort: Mechelen, Clous van

Artist: Gerry Mulligan
AlbumArtist: Various Artists
ArtistSort: Mulligan, Gerry

First question: Is there a besser way than "Various Artists" in the AlbumArtist? With my few compilations like Metal Ballads I overwrote "Various Artists" just with the album name, in this case "Metal Ballads".

Second question: Is this by design, that MinimServer show AlbumArtist under Artists and Artists under All Artists? So someone who has mostly compiliations should use All Artists instead of Artists when browsing?

Third question: How can I force MinimServer to use ArtistSort if not empty else Artist? Or is it recommended to always write the Artist in the format Surname, Firstname?

[simbun]

(01-01-2021 05:15)Mangar Wrote:  First question: Is there a besser way than "Various Artists" in the AlbumArtist? With my few compilations like Metal Ballads I overwrote "Various Artists" just with the album name, in this case "Metal Ballads".

"Various Artists" is the standard approach. The album doesn't belong to any one artist so you want to tag it as such, plus you might also want to filter on compilations so it's nice to have a single value to do this with (in the absence of any other).

(01-01-2021 05:15)Mangar Wrote:  Second question: Is this by design, that MinimServer show AlbumArtist under Artists and Artists under All Artists? So someone who has mostly compiliations should use All Artists instead of Artists when browsing?

For information on Artist indexing look at https://minimserver.com/ug-browsing.html...0selection

(01-01-2021 05:15)Mangar Wrote:  Third question: How can I force MinimServer to use ArtistSort if not empty else Artist? Or is it recommended to always write the Artist in the format Surname, Firstname?

Ideally you'd tag your music with:

Artist: Gary Moore
ArtistSort: Moore, Gary
AlbumArtist: Gary Moore (or Various Artists if it belongs to a compilation)
AlbumArtistSort: Moore, Gary (or Various Artists if it belongs to a compilation)

Then in MinimServer you can use the sorted tags for sort purposes https://minimserver.com/ug-library.html#...%20sorting

reverseName is just a "get out of jail free card" if, you haven't got the actual sort tags present, you've stored the artists as Surname, Firstname and you want to display/index them in the other order :-)

[simoncn]

(01-01-2021 05:15)Mangar Wrote:  Third question: How can I force MinimServer to use ArtistSort if not empty else Artist? Or is it recommended to always write the Artist in the format Surname, Firstname?

I am not sure of the context in which you want to "use ArtistSort if not empty else Artist". If this is for sorting purposes, you can set tagValue to:

Artist.value.sort={ArtistSort}

This uses the ArtistSort tag for sorting the artist name if there is an ArtistSort tag as well as an Artist tag. If there is no ArtistSort tag, the Artist tag is used as the sort value.