Display Track Artist instead of Album Artist

[simoncn]

It is difficult to explain this without getting deep into technical jargon but I will try.

The displayFormat option affects what metadata is sent to the control point for a track or album. This metadata includes things like the artist, album artist, track title, album title and genre. The control point uses this metadata for the Now Playing screen and when showing the contents of an album.

The index lists shown in the control point when you browse your MinimServer library (for example, Artist > artist-name and AlbumArtist > album-artist-name) are created by MinimServer from tag values, not from track and album metadata. MinimServer provides limited customisation of these index lists by means of the indexTags property and the indexFormat option. These index lists are not affected by displayFormat settings.

[MINmole]

(25-07-2024 21:32)simoncn Wrote:  I think the current implementation is correct. When playing a track, the control point should show the track artist in preference to the album artist if these are not the same. This is why the change in update 241 was made.

You can use tag formatting to show the album artist instead of the track artist in all places where control point shows a track artist. To do this, add the following to tagFormat:

Artist.displayFormat={$albumartist}

Alternatively, you can remove artist names from all tracks with this setting:

Artist.displayFormat={}

I'm having trouble with this setting. The desired outcome is that my control point (WIIM or BubbleUPnP) will show the album artist instead of the artist tag. I've added the line above to tagFormat with the same results as if the line was blank (yes, I saved, restarted, and refreshed). Am I doing something wrong?

[simoncn]

I tried BubbleUPnP with the setting Artist.displayFormat={$albumartist} and it worked as expected, with the album artist shown on the Now Playing screen. As well as restarting MinimServer, I needed to select Reload in BubbleUPnP to make BubbleUPnP update what it was showing.

[simbun]

The settings work for the track listing in the WHA but not the Now Playing screen where it pulls metadata from the file being served (assuming it's not being transcoded). If you watch carefully, the screen loads initially with the correct metadata then updates with the tags from the file.

I have raised a ticket for this, but there's been very little development/bug fixing in this area for quite some time now. BubbleUPnP is definitely the way to go.

[simoncn]

Thanks for spotting this. It means that there is nothing MinimServer can put in the metadata it sends to WHA to make WHA show the album artist in Now Playing.

[MINmole]

I tried BubbleUPnP again ( with Artist.displayFormat={$albumartist} ) and got the same results; no album artist shown on the now playing screen. What's interesting though, is that with the tagFormat value blank I get the artist displayed as "Various Artists" which is the tag I use for Artist. In other words, it must be doing something because it doesn't show the Artist tag, while still not displaying the Album Artist when I put "Artist.displayFormat={$albumartist}" in the tag format line.

What I'm looking for is a way to display the Artist for each song on a compilation album. I've been using Minimserver for years, and back in the old days I had issues with compilation albums that had different Artist tags. It would index it as separate albums for each artist, so if it was a large compilation I'd get 50 individual albums listed for the same compilation album. I went to tagging all of my compilation albums Artist tag as "Various Artists" and tagging the Album Artist tag specific to the track. This worked well for a long time until recently. Now when playing back compilation albums I don't have the individual artist listed on the now playing screen. Is there another workaround?

Thank you for the help!

[simoncn]

Thanks for explaining what is causing the problem. MinimServer doesn't allow you to have multiple AlbumArtist tags for an album. If you tag your files in this way (as you are doing), MinimServer will show error messages in the MinimServer log and will ignore all your AlbumArtist tags.

The fix for this problem is to tag AlbumArtist as Various Artists and tag track artists as Artist. MinimServer is designed to work this way and you won't be able to get things working correctly unless you make this change.

You should be able to simulate this change by putting the following in the aliasTags property:

Artist:AlbumArtist, AlbumArtist:Artist

This is a temporary measure to see what happens. It should not be a permanent setting.

[MINmole]

Thanks again!

I re-tagged my compilation album as suggested and it worked great (the only reason I didn't tag it that way before, was as mentioned, I could have sworn in the past it resulted in multiple album listings). Now I have the painful task of re-tagging all of my comps, but fortunately that's only a small part of my music collection.