Multiple Artists

[otnp]

Hi,

As of now, for Genres, if for example a song is tagged as "Hard Rock;Heavy Metal", it will appear under both in the genre category. Is It possible to do the same for multiple artists, for example songs labelled with "Method Man;Redman" would appear under both artists ?

Thank you

[blaubär]

10 minutes ago, otnp said:

Hi,

As of now, for Genres, if for example a song is tagged as "Hard Rock;Heavy Metal", it will appear under both in the genre category. Is It possible to do the same for multiple artists, for example songs labelled with "Method Man;Redman" would appear under both artists ?

Thank you

There have been discussions about this :

So I think this should be possible :

"And in tags which can have multiple entries (such as Artist, Genre, etc) the separator should be "//" or ";". "

Edited February 10, 2019 by blaubär

[tdas777]

I tried below characters as separator in artist field of mp3 file, none of them are considered as separator in Poweramp.

,

;

/

//

I use itunes on PC, I'm looking for that character which will be taken as separator both in itunes and Poweramp.

 

Any thoght?

[w3wilkes]

As far as I know the only field that currently supports multiple entries is the Genre tag and I believe both semi-colon ";" and double slash "//" work as separators. There are some other requests to have the Artist tag also support multiple artists.

[andrewilley]

If and when separators are supported in the Artist field, I would expect ";" or "//" to be used. A simple "/" would mess up artists like AC/DC.

Andre

[tdas777]

1 hour ago, andrewilley said:

If and when separators are supported in the Artist field, I would expect ";" or "//" to be used. A simple "/" would mess up artists like AC/DC.

Andre

Hi,

Does the current Poweramp support multiple artist separation? Yesterday I tried with those characters you mentioned; it was not detecting.

[blaubär]

31 minutes ago, tdas777 said:

Does the current Poweramp support multiple artist separation? Yesterday I tried with those characters you mentioned; it was not detecting.

Currently that is not supported.

[andrewilley]

59 minutes ago, tdas777 said:

Does the current Poweramp support multiple artist separation? 

No, I did say "if and when", indicating it is not currently supported.

Andre

[tdas777]

[Diego Coloma Martínez]

Has there been any news regarding this topic?

 bought the App a few days ago and I expected to have a good service, but I have not had a response.
I have music files that contain multiple artists or composers and only the last one always appears

[andrewilley]

Not yet. Support for multiple artists is planned for the future, but is not implemented as yet.

Currently the major dev work over the past few months has all been towards the EQ enhancements and stand-alone EQ module which are due for release imminently. Once that is released and has settled down, I expect Max will have a chance to start looking at other existing feature requests.

If you are only seeing one out of multiple artist names, then I suspect you are using Vorbis tagging which (unlike MP3 / ID3 tags) officially allows for multiple instances of the same tag name. e.g. rather than an MP3 file having one ARTIST tag with multiple names inside it - such as "Artist 1 ; Artist 2 ; Artist 3" - your tagging software is creating a FLAC file with several different tags all called ARTIST. PA will only see one of those multiple tags though. Until there is wider support for multiple instances of the same tag name, it might be better to have a single tag with the names separated by semicolons.

See also:

Andre

[MotleyG]

2 hours ago, Diego Coloma Martínez said:

Has there been any news regarding this topic?

 bought the App a few days ago and I expected to have a good service, but I have not had a response.
I have music files that contain multiple artists or composers and only the last one always appears

I see this is your only post, not sure what you mean by good service.  What other players currently support viewing multiple artists in lists or now playing? Especially on Android?

This is a feature many of us would like, and I'm sure will be added in the future.

[w3wilkes]

3 hours ago, MotleyG said:

What other players currently support viewing multiple artists in lists or now playing? Especially on Android?

I'm not aware of any on Android, but Logitech Media Server (which is available for Windows, Mac, most all Linux and Raspberry Pi systems) fully supports multiple artists in both the Album Artist and Artist tags for MP3, FLAC Vorbis or any other format.

[MotleyG]

30 minutes ago, w3wilkes said:

I'm not aware of any on Android, but Logitech Media Server (which is available for Windows, Mac, most all Linux and Raspberry Pi systems) fully supports multiple artists in both the Album Artist and Artist tags for MP3, FLAC Vorbis or any other format.

Correct, but my point was more about the expectation for an Android app. And LMS is one of very few that currently do handle multiple Artist tags properly, even on home servers.

Not that I think it precludes having it on our wish list. But the post from earlier today suggested it was an expectation to use PA now. There are no other alternatives on Android I am aware of at this time.

[w3wilkes]

Agree that there's no alternative on Android. I've been running LMS for my home stereos since 2008 and it's always supported multiple Artist / Album Artist since I've been using it so that's when I updated my tags to take advantage of that support. For on the go music I used a Creative Labs Zen Vision M w/60GB drive with a cassette adapter to use in the car. When I got my Android phone I initially used the Google Play Music app which I found lacking in capability until I found Poweramp which comes closest to the functions I've been spoiled with in LMS for many years.

Edited November 11, 2020 by w3wilkes

[Absinthequ]

If no support soon, we riot!

[Xaphan]

 As far as I know, some meta tags (APEv2, FLAC) can contain multiple values with the same key. And also since ID3v2.3 it is prescribed to separate artists with a "/".

[andrewilley]

6 hours ago, Xaphan said:

 As far as I know, some meta tags (APEv2, FLAC) can contain multiple values with the same key. And also since ID3v2.3 it is prescribed to separate artists with a "/".

Yes, the Vorbis and APE specs both allow for multiple instances of the same tag (although APE does it by using one key, which can contain multiple entries). MP3Tag will even try to save multiple tags within formats that don't officially support it (such as ID3). Tagscanner does not do this.

Separating artist names using a "/" is not necessarily a good idea by the way - would you prefer to listen to music by the band "AC" or by the band "DC" for example?  The consensus seem to be to use ";" or "//" to separate artists within a single tag. Also MP3Tag uses "\\" to indicate where two tags of the same name are being used. I would suggest that all three should be enabled by default, but if you really want to have "/" too (and you have no tracks by AC/DC) then you can always add it to the user-defined list.

It's still all a bit of a moot point at the moment though as there are very few music players which support this at all as yet (we think none at all on Android, and a handful on PCs). It will be great when PA does handle multiple artists though, as it does seem to be a very much requested feature. 

Andre  

[Kundun]

What about the idea to add the option to parse only the first artist in the list? I've seen this implemented in others players/scrobblers. This may seems unusual but if you listen to a lot of classical music you probably want a record to be under (e.g.) Ludwig von Beethoven , and not six duplicates of it under Margarete Bäumer, Heinz Sauerbaum, Manfred Hübner, Symphony Orchestra of the Mitteldeutsche Rundfunk, Chorus of the Mitteldeutsche Rundfunk, Gerhard Pflüger. This may be implemented on single album-level, but a general option in the settings would be appreciated too.

[andrewilley]

If you don't want an artist to be included in the list of artists, why would you not not just remove them from the tag? Beethoven would presumably be in listed the Composer tag anyway, as last time I checked there are no live recordings of him playing.

Andre

[Kundun]

Because ID3 tags are a way to store all types of album related-data, not necessarily only the ones needed to have a good-looking library, and since for me what a music player should do is to create an abstraction layer from what humans perceive as important in their music library and what's contained in their files, I don't see this request as that unreasonable (if I just want a raw display of my ID3 tags I can use a File Manager, right?).

Plus: this is how Picard and MusicBrainz in general works with classical recordings (the first artist in the list is the most relevant one), and in a way it's more or less an open standard that everybody can agree with (Do you really want a list entry for every single combination of composer, singer, symphony, chorus, etc?)

Edited November 12, 2020 by Kundun

[MotleyG]

46 minutes ago, Kundun said:

Because ID3 tags are a way to store all types of album related-data, not necessarily only the ones needed to have a good-looking library, and since for me what a music player should do is to create an abstraction layer from what humans perceive as important in their music library and what's contained in their files, I don't see this request as that unreasonable (if I just want a raw display of my ID3 tags I can use a File Manager, right?).

You could easily manage this type of info management using several other tag options. In these cases you could even add a custom tag with whatever name you choose, at least with mp3tag that I can confirm from personal experience.

But the Artist tags for consistency within any player and display should be just that, the Artist. If there are multiple artists as this feature request is built on, at least that is regarding other contributing Artists. Otherwise the player would have no way of separating these tag fields.

[andrewilley]

I think everyone can agree that support for multiple Artists (and Composers) would be a generally good thing for Poweramp, and it will make PA the first Android music app to support the feature. It should work for multiple individual tags (for Vorbis / APE files) and also separate content within one tag (using "//", "\\", ";", etc).

However what you place in those tags is up to you though, and PA probably should not enforce any usage directives on users, it should assume all content is of equal value. Different tagging systems allow for different options, but ID3 v2.3/2.4 provides for (amongst dozens of other tags):

• Lead performer(s)/Soloist(s) [TPE1]
• Band/orchestra/accompaniment [TPE2]
• Conductor/performer refinement [TPE3]
• Interpreted, remixed, or otherwise modified by [TPE4]
• Composer [TCOM]
• Lyricist/Text writer [TEXT]
• Involved people list [IPLS/TIPL]
• Musician credits list [TMCL]

Currently, PA follows popular usage and supports TPE1 as Track Artist, TPE2 as Album Artist, and TCOM as Composer.

Somewhat related to this, but there was another Feature Request a while back which might help, which was to allow the two main track information lines in PA to be user-configurable. So perhaps it might be possible at some stage to not only assign content using simple "%title", "%artist%, %albumartist%, and "%album" descriptors, but also optional subdivisions such as "%artist1", "%artist2", etc? Just a thought anyway, but it's nothing imminent. 

Andre

[Xaphan]

I also want to remind you that the words "feat." , "ft.", "f.", "f /", "with.", "w /", "mix", "remix" can separate authors which can be in title and artist lines. 

[Xaphan]

17 hours ago, andrewilley said:

MP3Tag will even try to save multiple tags within formats that don't officially support it (such as ID3). Tagscanner does not do this.

Some programs write ape tags together with ID3 tags. This is also done in foobar2000