Conflicting album artist values

[bbrip]

you are right that at the moment ony one value (the first) is picked up by Twonky - altough there is intense debate to allow multiple entries in future versions similar to what is already possible for GENRE tag.

Problem with Orchestra, Conductor and similar tags is that no control point displays them. But suggestion 1) sounds quite reasonable.

I just thing that soloist / orchestra / conductor is the most sensible way of listing. Thats usually also the order the performers get listed on the CD cover - or how they get listed in magazine reviews such as Grammophone.

bbrip

NB: need to watch our team beat the Greek now ( hopefully....)

[simoncn]

(22-06-2012 19:31)bbrip Wrote:  you are right that at the moment ony one value (the first) is picked up by Twonky - altough there is intense debate to allow multiple entries in future versions similar to what is already possible for GENRE tag.

If they do it like GENRE, it's still one value as far as the tagging rules are concerned, so this would be a convention for how Twonky builds its search trees rather than a change to the rules for tagging. If they use a comma as the separator, that could cause problems if one of the album artist names contains a comma (not impossible).

Quote:Problem with Orchestra, Conductor and similar tags is that no control point displays them.

This isn't a problem if you're using MinimServer as the server. MinimServer sends the control point an artist string that includes Conductor/Artist/Orchestra information.

Quote:But suggestion 1) sounds quite reasonable.

It's the simplest approach and gets you what you want right now.

Quote:I just thing that soloist / orchestra / conductor is the most sensible way of listing. Thats usually also the order the performers get listed on the CD cover - or how they get listed in magazine reviews such as Grammophone.

I checked a few and it seems you're right. I'll change the order in a future release of MinimServer.

Quote:NB: need to watch our team beat the Greek now ( hopefully....)

Good luck! It will be "interesting" if England are playing Germany in the semifinals.

[bbrip]

I am still not sure on what the ALBUMARTIST tag is really worth if it is limited to 1 artist... Albums can have more than one Albumartist - its beyond me....

I'll set up a testbed and play around with some custom tags but wont embark on any major overhaul of my tagging standards for my "real live" audioserver quite yet. AT least I'd need some features in the server that translate Firstname Lastname into Lastname, Firstname reliably. Not an easy task because it needs to take proper care of the "von" and "van" and "d'" and "de" and "del" and "di" and "du" and... and... and.... On the other hand "Mc" and Mac" are part of the last name. oouuffff

Anyway thanks for providing food for thought.

bbrip

[simoncn]

(23-06-2012 13:36)bbrip Wrote:  I am still not sure on what the ALBUMARTIST tag is really worth if it is limited to 1 artist... Albums can have more than one Albumartist - its beyond me....

I've heard it said that the AlbumArtist is the artist under which the CD would be filed in a record store.

It the CD has a single artist, AlbumArtist and Artist are equivalent. If the CD has many tracks with different artists (perhaps a compilation of recordings by various different artists), the AlbumArtist might be something like Various Artists.

Personally I haven't found much use for AlbumArtist, but there are some people who use it a lot.

Quote:I'll set up a testbed and play around with some custom tags but wont embark on any major overhaul of my tagging standards for my "real live" audioserver quite yet. AT least I'd need some features in the server that translate Firstname Lastname into Lastname, Firstname reliably. Not an easy task because it needs to take proper care of the "von" and "van" and "d'" and "de" and "del" and "di" and "du" and... and... and.... On the other hand "Mc" and Mac" are part of the last name. oouuffff

Anyway thanks for providing food for thought.

bbrip

I can think of two approaches for doing this.

Option 1:

Add support for custom sorting without changing how the artist name appears in the tag. So the tag
ARTIST=Anne-Sophie Mutter
woould be sorted under M in a list of artists. The name would appear as Anne-Sophie Mutter in the Artist and All Artists index and on the control point.

The sort order would be decided using a combination of rules and exceptions. For example, a "last name first" rule would create a sort key that starts with the last word (blank-separated). For cases where this rule would produce the wrong result, you'd be able to define individual exceptions for specific artists.

Option 2:

The artist would need to be tagged as last name first, and this would be transformed for presentation. So a tag of
ARTIST=Mutter, Anne-Sophie
would be sorted exactly as it's written, and would be transformed to "Anne-Sophie Mutter" when it's sent to the control point and possibly when it's displayed in the Artist and Alll Artists indexes. The transformation only needs to look for the first comma, and there's no need for custom exceptions.

The first approach uses ARTIST tags in the usual format found in downloads and music databases, but is more complex to implement in the server because of the need for user-defined exceptions. The second approach requires a different style of ARTIST tags, but is easier for the server to implement.

[bbrip]

(23-06-2012 17:58)simoncn Wrote:  I've heard it said that the AlbumArtist is the artist under which the CD would be filed in a record store.

As those stores have largely vanished, no more need for that definition

Seriously: Why not provide that tag with a "new" live. There is no logical reason whatsoever why not more than one entry should be allowed here.

(23-06-2012 17:58)simoncn Wrote:  I can think of two approaches for doing this.

Option 1:

Add support for custom sorting without changing how the artist name appears in the tag. So the tag
ARTIST=Anne-Sophie Mutter
woould be sorted under M in a list of artists. The name would appear as Anne-Sophie Mutter in the Artist and All Artists index and on the control point.

The sort order would be decided using a combination of rules and exceptions. For example, a "last name first" rule would create a sort key that starts with the last word (blank-separated). For cases where this rule would produce the wrong result, you'd be able to define individual exceptions for specific artists.

Option 2:

The artist would need to be tagged as last name first, and this would be transformed for presentation. So a tag of
ARTIST=Mutter, Anne-Sophie
would be sorted exactly as it's written, and would be transformed to "Anne-Sophie Mutter" when it's sent to the control point and possibly when it's displayed in the Artist and Alll Artists indexes. The transformation only needs to look for the first comma, and there's no need for custom exceptions.

The first approach uses ARTIST tags in the usual format found in downloads and music databases, but is more complex to implement in the server because of the need for user-defined exceptions. The second approach requires a different style of ARTIST tags, but is easier for the server to implement.

Option 2 sounds definitely like the more logical one to me. Solves all the "exception" coding issues: Everything that follows after the comma is the 'First Name'.
so: "Karajan, Herbert von" will show as "Herbert von Karajan" in the control point. Sounds great to me!

Cheers
bbrip

[simoncn]

(23-06-2012 20:04)bbrip Wrote:  Seriously: Why not provide that tag with a "new" live. There is no logical reason whatsoever why not more than one entry should be allowed here.

It's possible, but I think it would introduce further confusion about the difference between Artist and AlbumArtist and how these tags should be treated by the server. For example, MinimServer currently uses the ALBUMARTIST tag (if present) to decide whether multiple discs that have the same title should be merged into a multi-disc album set. This wouldn't work if multiple ALBUMARTIST values were allowed and different discs had different combinations of ALBUMARTIST values.

If you want to credit multiple artists for an album, it's easy to do that by tagging it as
ALBUMARTIST=artist1, artist2

Quote:Option 2 sounds definitely like the more logical one to me. Solves all the "exception" coding issues: Everything that follows after the comma is the 'First Name'.
so: "Karajan, Herbert von" will show as "Herbert von Karajan" in the control point. Sounds great to me!

The difficulty with this is the need for the user to redo all the ARTIST tags after ripping or downloading.

Perhaps the right answer is for the server to provide a choice of transformation/sorting rules, so people could tag in either style and choose the transformation/sorting rule that matches their tagging style.

A further refinement could be for the server to allow a mixture of these styles in the same collection, and look for the presence of a comma to decide which style is being used.

[bbrip]

most tagging needs to be redone anyway - at least for classical music. And there are some of the more forward-thinking and adventurous labels already tagging composers and artists in the Lastname / Firstname manner. Hyperion being one (but not the only one..)

And on those "multi-disc" albums - I never quite got that. Putting an album on mutiple discs is simply a necessity resp. limiting factor of that last-century music storage medium called "CD". It would never cross my mind to tag a Wagner opera according to the way it was squeezed across 4 CDs (altough it only has three acts....). Its just artificial. So I simply tag from track 1 to 65 - or whatever number of tracks that opera might have. Who cares about "discs" when we talk online storage ?

Sorry - I guess I'm getting carried away....

[simoncn]

(23-06-2012 23:32)bbrip Wrote:  most tagging needs to be redone anyway - at least for classical music. And there are some of the more forward-thinking and adventurous labels already tagging composers and artists in the Lastname / Firstname manner. Hyperion being one (but not the only one..)

That's interesting. It would be great if all the record companies and music databases could use a consistent standard for tagging. This would make life much easier for users as well as for server developers.

Quote:And on those "multi-disc" albums - I never quite got that. Putting an album on mutiple discs is simply a necessity resp. limiting factor of that last-century music storage medium called "CD". It would never cross my mind to tag a Wagner opera according to the way it was squeezed across 4 CDs (altough it only has three acts....). Its just artificial. So I simply tag from track 1 to 65 - or whatever number of tracks that opera might have. Who cares about "discs" when we talk online storage ?

Sorry - I guess I'm getting carried away....

I'm with you on this, and my initial support for this in MinimServer was to combine all the discs and renumber the tracks. For example, for an album with DISCNUMBER=1 / TRACKNUMBER=1...10 and DISCNUMBER=2 / TRACKNUMBER=1...4, MinimServer would merge this into a single album with TRACKNUMBER=1...14. I was surprised at how many people didn't want this, but wanted to see "discs" when browsing their collection. So now MinimServer supports both approaches, and I hope everyone is happy!

[Dieter Stockert]

(23-06-2012 20:04)bbrip Wrote:  Option 2 sounds definitely like the more logical one to me. Solves all the "exception" coding issues: Everything that follows after the comma is the 'First Name'.
so: "Karajan, Herbert von" will show as "Herbert von Karajan" in the control point. Sounds great to me!

+1

[Dieter Stockert]

(23-06-2012 23:32)bbrip Wrote:  And on those "multi-disc" albums - I never quite got that. Putting an album on mutiple discs is simply a necessity resp. limiting factor of that last-century music storage medium called "CD". [...] So I simply tag from track 1 to 65 - or whatever number of tracks that opera might have.

+1