Issues on Album Artist field (1 Viewer)

[mp.user]

MediaPortal Version: 1.2.1.0
MediaPortal Skin: PureVisionHD 4.9

Dear community,

I have two problems concerning the Album Artist field, and I guess this is because Media Portal expects a certain usage of that field.

First of all, let me explain how my collection is organized. It mainly consists of FLAC and MP3 file and contains a lot of DJ mixes. A DJ mix is an album with the following properties:

• There are no gaps between tracks.
• At least one DJ is the main artist of the mix, i.e. he is associated with a number of tracks.
• A single mix can be made by more than one DJ, for example: tracks 1 to 10 are mixed by DJ A, and tracks 11 to 20 by DJ B, and there's no gap between any of the 20 tracks.

All my files are tagged properly. The Album Artist field is set as follows:

1. On albums: main artist of the album
2. On samplers: field is not set, because an album artist does not exist on a sampler
3. On DJ mixes: The DJ who mixed the current track

That means I have albums with a single album artist, albums with no album artist and albums with multiple album artists.

In Media Portal, I've noticed the following:

• If an album has no album artist, Media Portal uses the (track) artist as album artist. There's no empty album artist. In other words, a single sampler is shown as a lot of albums, each containing just a single track.
• When I create a Music View with just an Album and no Album Artist, Media Portal nevertheless shows every album divided per album artist. In other words, A single DJ mix is shown as several separate albums, and I cannot listen to it from the beginning to the end wihout creating a playlist.

I want two avoid these 2 behaviours. Can someone plase tell me how I can achieve that? It would be great if this could be done just by configuration. If not, I guess I need something like

• An option to allow an emtpy Album Artist field (grouping all albums without an album artist field)
• An option to allow multiple Album Artists per album

I don't want to use a dummy artist like "Various Artists" for samplers because I want my collection to be independent of any software, and in real life, a sampler just doesn't have an album artist. And I don't want to merge the album artist field of DJ mixes, because I lose the information which DJ created what part of the mix.

I've searched the Wiki and the forums for answers but didn't find anything. Any hint is greatly appreciated.

 

[jameson_uk]

I don't want to use a dummy artist like "Various Artists" for samplers because I want my collection to be independent of any software, and in real life, a sampler just doesn't have an album artist. And I don't want to merge the album artist field of DJ mixes, because I lose the information which DJ created what part of the mix.

AIUI this is how the id3 standard is defined but not all players support standards. My thinking is that album artist is where you would find the album in a shop (where samplers would be under "various artists").

The artist tag can then be used to say who is on the track.

As for DJ mixes, they are the same. They should be tagged with various artists and then DJ added as artist (or one of the non standard tags that MP currently does not recognise)

What problems do you encounter with having DJ A and DJ B ? (I know MP will show this as two albums but it has to; take "greatest hits" without an album artist you can not split albums by tags

Just wondering what others do for DJ mixes as most software does not cope with them too well.

 

[mp.user]

AW: Issues on Album Artist field

As for DJ mixes, they are the same. They should be tagged with various artists and then DJ added as artist (or one of the non standard tags that MP currently does not recognise)

I do understand now how you interpret Album Artist. The ID3 spec doesn't precisely define the content of this field ("additional information about the performers in the recording"), though. Wherever possible I use the ID3 standard fields for the sake of because of application compatibility, so there are

• Artist (TPE1)
• Album Artist (TPE2)
• Conductor (TPE3)
• Remixer (TPE4)

for the DJ info. Artist and Remixer are already set in my collection, thus only Album Artist and Conductor remain. I decided to use the former one; If necessary, I can change this to Conductor. Can MediaPortal show view the Conductor field in track lists? This could be a solution for my second problem, then.

What problems do you encounter with having DJ A and DJ B ? (I know MP will show this as two albums but it has to; take "greatest hits" without an album artist you can not split albums by tags

The problem is that there's no possibility to list / play the complete mix from the first to the last track (without creating playlists for each mix manually).
I get your point on "Greatest Hits" - an album is identified by the combination of album artist and album title here. One could argue that all tracks of a certain "Greatest Hits" album should reside in the same directory, but I prefer the way that is currently implemented in Media Portal.

So, finally, 2 questions remain:

1. Does MediaPortal suppose a special meaning of the Conductor field (as it does on Album Artist)?
2. Can I somehow enforce a policy "Treat empty Album Artist as a separate value (don't use the main artist instead)"?

 

[hwahrmann]

Don't have time to read / try out your problem that you have today.

In short:

Yes, Conductor is used within MP and you can build a view on it.

I usually use some Value on the "Album Artist" fields for samplers. For example the "Cafe Del Mar" samplers would have that string in Album Artist.
Sometimes i use the Genre in the Album Artist.

iirc, we used "Various Artists" as the Album Artist, if we find Multiple Artists in an album.
For that you need to have the "Treat folder as album" check box checked.

We might have a problem and this is no longer working as it should, but i never noticed it until now, since i always have something filled into the Album Artist field.
Maybe i find some time later today to have a look into this.

 

[jameson_uk]

To answer one specific question, MP does have a bit of a workaround in

        if (!tag.HasAlbumArtist)
        {
          tag.AlbumArtist = tag.Artist;
        }

so the artist tag will be used if no album artist tag is present which I guess was put there to get around the fact that people do not always tag their music correctly.


Going back to basics though and ignoring what is tagged, how do you want to browse your tracks as this is what we really need to understand (it does appear you want to browse different tracks in different ways)?

It sounds like for some albums you want to go
Album Artist | Album | Disc# |Tracks
but for samplers you want to do something different (not sure how you want to browse these) and for DJ Mixes you want to go
Album | DJ | Tracks

There is no DJ tag so you can't do that, neither can you browse different tracks in different ways in the same view.

If you were to tag mixes and compilations with a various artists tag and add the DJ as the composer then you could have a view of
Album Artist | Album | Composer | Disc# | Tracks
and skip single values for Composer and Disc #

This would then allow you to play from the album level to play the whole mix or play DJ A's tracks from the composer level etc but this would also work for standard albums with only a single (or no) composer tag as that level would be skipped.

The implementation of tags varies massively between different players and trying to keep your music player agnostic is not always possible. That said, almost every player I have used expects (or copes well with) having a "Various Artists" album artists for compilations (which is what I was trying to say badly before)...

Unfortunately ID3 is very generic hence players interpret different tags as different things and in different ways... just look at the rating tag... I think this is possibly dealt with differently by almost every single player.

 

[mp.user]

AW: Issues on Album Artist field

First of all, thanks for your answers.

I made a copy of a small subset of my collection and tried different settings on it.

hwahrmann:
Thanks for the hint on the checkbox "Treat folder as album". It seems to solve my first problem: all tracks within the same directory that have no album artist are treated as an album - great
I played around with the checkbox before, but didn't see any difference. It seems I have to wipe out and then rebuild the database manually to see the effect.

jameson_uk:
I moved the DJ info from Album Artist to Conductor field, and this solves my second problem. I can use the DJ info in a view and in track lists, but MP also shows the complete album in the album view. My views now look:

• for albums, compilations and mixes: Album Artist (index page) | Album Artist | Album | Tracks (sorted by Disc#)
• only for mixes: Conductor | Album | Tracks (sorted by Disc#)

and the Conductor field is used in the Sort By elements so that the DJ is shown on track lists.

It seems that my issues are solved by now
I check this on my complete collection in the next few days.


Unfortunately, I found two other minor issues:

1. The field Conductor works with MP3 and FLAC, but it doesn't for MP4 (AAC) files. It seems not to be read.
2. The "/" (slash) character is used as divider on the Album Artist field of ID3 tags (MP3 files), e.g. dividing V/A into two album artists V and A. This is not the case for FLAC and MP4.

Can you confirm these issues? Are they intended, or can they be changed?


- Edit -

Assumption 1:
I didn't find a spec for MP4 metadata, but according to the AtomicParsley docs there seems to be no conductor field. If MP doesn't offer a workaround, I'll have to stick to the Composer field (which is a little bit "unnaturally" for DJ info).

Assumption 2:
I read in another post that the slash character is defined as divider in the ID3 V2.3 spec. ID3 2.4 uses the null character (which is far better IMHO).

Please confirm.

 

[hwahrmann]

We should support a Conductor in MP4.
For reading the tags, we use taglib-sharp, which haas support for the Conductor. Depends on the type of Tag Editor you use.
In my MPTagThat implementation, i use taglib-sharp as well, so you should be able to set it from there.

However i'm about to leave to the airport for a business trip, so i can't verify it.

Yes. Using ID3 2.3 specs, you MUST not use the slash as a separator, as it'll traet it as 2 separate artists.
If you want thgat you need to write 2.4 tags.
MPTagThat can help here as well.

 

[mp.user]

AW: Issues on Album Artist field

I'm using MP3Tag as tagger. With help of a hex editor, I found out that the Conductor field is stored as MP4 data atom with name CONDUCTOR. Next, I found out that TagLib# uses a data atom with name COND. Thus, I configured MP3Tag to use COND (which is perfectly possible) and controlled the result with a hex editor again.

Unfortunately, MediaPortal still doesn't get the conductor

I therefore installed MPTagThat 3.0.1 to see if my files can be handled by TagLib# correctly. I still have no luck: MPTagThat shows only MP3 files, when I select a folder with FLAC or M4A files, no files are displayed - so I cannot control my files

It would be nice if someone could confirm whether the Conductor field is working for MP4 files.

Another little thing: the Conductor field seems not to be supported in track format masks; so I can use it in Music Views to filter my collection, but I cannot display it in track lists.

 

[mp.user]

AW: Issues on Album Artist field

Could please someone check if the Conductor field is imported from MP4 files into the MediaPortal database?

 

[mp.user]

AW: Issues on Album Artist field

Anyone?