AlbumArtist misses artists

[Peter26J]

I'm playing with minimserver for two weeks now and today I found that at least one artist is missing in the AlbumArtist list. I saw this on BubblePNP and tested it on VLC as well and see the same error. I can find the artist in the list of artists, but they are also in the AlbumArtist field.

The artiste is "La Petite Bande" and is used in the AlbumArtist field together with the conductor "Sigiswald Kuijken" who is also not listed in the AlbumArtist field.
To be clear, the tracks of this album have two AlbumArtist fields.

When I search the same albums under Composer Bach, and choose AlbumArtist these albums also show up, but under a section '[unknown]'.
Under section '[unknown]' are more albums that definitively have an AlbumArtist and are not unkown.

I tried rescan and restarting minimserver, a few times, but to no avail.
I also deleted the profile with all my settings and importing it again, but that also does not work.

See also my attached screenshots.

I'm running MinimServer 2.2 update 238 on a Synology DS920+ that is fully updated.

Any ideas what to do?
Thanks for any help.

[stefano_mbp]

There should (must) be only one value for AlbumArtist for each album.
If you check the log you should find errors reported while scanning those albums

[Peter26J]

(20-02-2023 22:20)stefano_mbp Wrote:  There should (must) be only one value for AlbumArtist for each album.
If you check the log you should find errors reported while scanning those albums

You are right. "Warning: conflicting ALBUMARTIST values ignored for file ..."
There are very many of this in my library.
That's a bummer.

But, thanks for the answer.
I have to decide what to do with it.
I like the adjustability and versatility of minimserver, but this is not the way I have tagged.

[simoncn]

Do you use the ARTIST tag as well as ALBUMARTIST? If so, what is the difference between how you use these?

[Peter26J]

(22-02-2023 09:55)simoncn Wrote:  Do you use the ARTIST tag as well as ALBUMARTIST? If so, what is the difference between how you use these?

Good question. I find good tagging quite puzzling.

I use the ARTIST tag on a per track basis, can be different among different track. Especially when there are different soloists in a movement.
With ALBUMARTIST I tag the main player, the ensemble and the conductor.
With ALBUMARTIST I want to find the albums, with ARTIST I want to find the individual tracks.

Example:
ARTIST: The London Symphony Orchestra\\London Symphony Chorus
CONDUCTOR: Claudio Abbado
COMPOSER: Mendelssohn, Felix
ALBUMARTIST: The London Symphony Orchestra\\London Symphony Chorus\\Claudio Abbado
\\ is to create separate tags in mp3tag.

I decided to exclude the composer from the albumartist, although I have some older albums that use the composer as well.

By the way, I use Emby as my main mediahub and Emby has no problem with different ALBUMARTIST tags, but uses any of the them to find the album.
But Emby lacks the possibility to adjust the DLNA. For example, it does not use the STYLE, CONDUCTOR, MOVEMENT or ORIGINALDATE tags.

[simbun]

I used Emby for years for movies, but the last time I looked at it for music it relied heavily on musicbrainz id's for defining albums. If you have musicbrainz id's (specifically ones that identify the album e.g. musicbrainz_albumid) in your tags then you should be able to do something similar to what I described here.

Assuming you have musicbrainz_albumid:

Code:

aliasTags: AlbumArtist:inAlbumArtist, MusicBrainz_AlbumID:AlbumArtist
indexTags: inAlbumArtist:Album Artist
tagFormat: AlbumArtist.displayFormat={$inAlbumArtist}

The only problem I can see is that you'll essentially lose the Artist index, as it combines track artist and album artist and indexFormat doesn't seem to apply to the AlbumArtist index (I assume because it's a non-standard index) so you'll see the musicbrainz_albumid's.

[simoncn]

With these settings there will be no AlbumArtist index, just an Album Artist index. To select tracks using artist tags, the All Artists index can be used. This is probably the best that can be achieved.

[simbun]

(23-02-2023 08:13)simoncn Wrote:  With these settings there will be no AlbumArtist index, just an Album Artist index.

Code:

indexTags: inAlbumArtist:AlbumArtist

"Fixed" ;-)
I'm just in the habit of having 'Album Artist' and 'Track Artist'.

(23-02-2023 08:13)simoncn Wrote:  To select tracks using artist tags, the All Artists index can be used. This is probably the best that can be achieved.

From his description he would have needed to use the All Artists index anyway for track selection.
It didn't sound like the OP would make use of the Artist index but I thought I'd best mention it, although it can obviously be created with .default={inAlbumArtist, Artist}.

Good to see there's no negatives doing it this way though. I use this approach for Album so I might start doing it for AlbumArtist too, even though I've probably only got a handful of albums where I've had to pick between multiple album artists.

[Peter26J]

(23-02-2023 08:13)simoncn Wrote:  With these settings there will be no AlbumArtist index, just an Album Artist index. To select tracks using artist tags, the All Artists index can be used. This is probably the best that can be achieved.

Thanks, I'm playing with your comment, also reading other posts about this and MinimServer manual.
I'm using the discogsid in stead of musicbrainz. I have some issues with musicbrainz and emby and I use discogs.
So far, no easy solution. Maybe I drop the AlbumArtist tag all together and go from the Artist tag to the album.

[simbun]

(26-02-2023 11:13)Peter26J Wrote:  I'm using the discogsid in stead of musicbrainz. I have some issues with musicbrainz and emby and I use discogs.

When you say "discogsid" do you mean that you have a discogs based album identifier, or that you just use discogs for tagging instead of musicbrainz? It doesn't matter where the id comes from (mine is just a hash of a number of tags).
It would be a shame not to use your albumartist values.

EDIT: Using Mp3Tag to test with, it looks like Discogs has a DISCOGS_RELEASE_ID; it's whether you keep that.