Multiple Artists

[andrewilley]

5 hours ago, Xaphan said:

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. 

As can the word "and", or even a simple ampersand character ("&"). But it's probably not a good idea to have too many default entries like that as you would create issues with bands like "Adam & the Ants", "Siouxsie and the Banshees" and so on. Personally I hate the trendy term of "featuring" and all its abbreviated derivatives by the way - especially when they are used in the Song Title for some reason.

And then there are commonly-referenced combined identities which also exist as two solo performers, such as Bridge Over Trouble Water which is credited as being by "Simon & Garfunkel". The official catalogue description of the track doesn't include both artists' full names, even though they do have a separate body of solo work too. I previously suggested that to cover all bases in such cases, users might want to edit the Artist tags to show as "Simon & Garfunkel ; Paul Simon ; Art Garfunkel" so the track would appear under all three identities.

Andre

[Absinthequ]

On 11/13/2020 at 4:12 AM, andrewilley said:

As can the word "and", or even a simple ampersand character ("&"). But it's probably not a good idea to have too many default entries like that as you would create issues with bands like "Adam & the Ants", "Siouxsie and the Banshees" and so on. Personally I hate the trendy term of "featuring" and all its abbreviated derivatives by the way - especially when they are used in the Song Title for some reason.

And then there are commonly-referenced combined identities which also exist as two solo performers, such as Bridge Over Trouble Water which is credited as being by "Simon & Garfunkel". The official catalogue description of the track doesn't include both artists' full names, even though they do have a separate body of solo work too. I previously suggested that to cover all bases in such cases, users might want to edit the Artist tags to show as "Simon & Garfunkel ; Paul Simon ; Art Garfunkel" so the track would appear under all three identities.

Andre

I think this circles me right back around to confusion and chaos of this isn't done right. 

If i have a song tagged as Artist "Linkin park; Hybrid Theory; Chester Bennington; Mike Shinoda" do i see all of that when in a list or playing a song? In this instance i dont want to see all of that, i just want them linked and to show Hybrid Theory as the artist. 

Now say i have a song from the same album and it features a few guest artists on it. Do you tag the additional artists and see all of that as one massive artist line? I want to actually see the featured guests. 

I think for me, it makes sense you have the Artist tag as the splitter and you see the Album Artist as the actual artist when in lists and playing so you don't see all of the unnecessary tags. 

You could say you now tag the featured guests in the Album Artist tag and then you can see that. But I'm not sure how you get around Poweramp grouping these as separate albums in an artist list. 

For me, i tag everything in Artist i want split (including guests) and i add the the guests as "feat." In the song title. I only ever see the "Album Artist"  as the artist of the song. Then Poweramp doesn't split them and i will have my multiple artists everywhere. 

Edited November 14, 2020 by Absinthequ

[MotleyG]

27 minutes ago, Absinthequ said:

I think this circles me right back around to confusion and chaos of this isn't done right. 

If i have a song tagged as Artist "Linkin park; Hybrid Theory; Chester Bennington; Mike Shinoda" do i see all of that when in a list or playing a song? In this instance i dont want to see all of that, i just want them linked and to show Hybrid Theory as the artist. 

Now say i have a song from the same album and it features a few guest artists on it. Do you tag the additional artists and see all of that as one massive artist line? I want to actually see the featured guests. 

I think for me, it makes sense you have the Artist tag as the splitter and you see the Album Artist as the actual artist when in lists and playing so you don't see all of the unnecessary tags. 

You could say you now tag the featured guests in the Album Artist tag and then you can see that. But I'm not sure how you get around Poweramp grouping these as separate albums in an artist list. 

For me, i tag everything in Artist i want split (including guests) and i add the the guests as "feat." In the song title. I only ever see the "Album Artist"  as the artist of the song. Then Poweramp doesn't split them and i will have my multiple artists everywhere. 

I'm positive the Album Artist tag has to be consistent for all tracks on a single Album. That is what keeps them grouped properly. Only the track Artist tag(s) can vary.

[andrewilley]

1 hour ago, Absinthequ said:

If i have a song tagged as Artist "Linkin park; Hybrid Theory; Chester Bennington; Mike Shinoda" do i see all of that when in a list or playing a song?

I think for me, it makes sense you have the Artist tag as the splitter and you see the Album Artist as the actual artist when in lists and playing so you don't see all of the unnecessary tags. 

Yes, I would expect that you would see all of the names given in the Artist tag (TPE1) on the player screen, and also in song lists, just as you do at the moment. That is the whole point of having them listed as an Artist on the track, and they all have equal priority.

The idea of processing and splitting the Artist tag internally is so you can access the track via different lists. For example at present, the Xmas classic Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy only shows in the library by an artist/band named "David Bowie & Bing Crosby". With separated artists, that same track would appear twice in the Library - once alongside songs by "David Bowie", but also under the "Bing Crosby" song list too. In the player screen, or in the meta wording under the song title in a list, you would still see the song correctly credited as being by both "David Bowie, Bing Crosby".

Max could choose to add a feature where a user could opt to display only the first of multiple names in the Player Screen, however as the Vorbis system supports individual tags for each separate ARTIST name, it might be hard to control which one gets saved into the file first. 
 

46 minutes ago, MotleyG said:

I'm positive the Album Artist tag has to be consistent for all tracks on a single Album. That is what keeps them grouped properly. Only the track Artist tag(s) can vary.

Correct. Album Artist is an additional control field that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with anyone who actually performs on a particular track, but it provides a 'grouping' item to indicate that several track with the same Album Title and Album Artist value should be considered to be part of one 'album'. The "Various Artists" example is an obvious one to link together completely separate songs in a collection, but the extra tag is also useful where most of the tracks on an album are by one artist, but a couple may have guest singers too. Without an overall Album Artist tag to link them together, the duet songs would get split out into their own little one-song albums.

There are dozen of other esoteric tags defined in the ID3 spec (and Vorbis/APE too) most of which are unlikely to ever be used or displayed by Poweramp, including two spare artist-related ones (TPE3 and TPE4). A couple that are read are Composer [TCOM] and Comment [COMM], which can be seen in the Info/Tags display. Poweramp is not an all-encompassing tag manipulator though, it's a music player.

Andre

[Absinthequ]

9 hours ago, andrewilley said:

The idea of processing and splitting the Artist tag internally is so you can access the track via different lists. For example at present, the Xmas classic Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy only shows in the library by an artist/band named "David Bowie & Bing Crosby". With separated artists, that same track would appear twice in the Library - once alongside songs by "David Bowie", but also under the "Bing Crosby" song list too. In the player screen, or in the meta wording under the song title in a list, you would still see the song correctly credited as being by both "David Bowie, Bing Crosby".

This would only work if you do not use any of the "view album artist instead of artist"  options, otherwise you would not see any of those multiple artists. You would only see album artist tag as usual everywhere.  

This wouldn't bother me. I would continue to tag those artists in the song title after "feat".

[andrewilley]

1 hour ago, Absinthequ said:

This would only work if you do not use any of the "view album artist instead of artist"  options

True, if you have already chosen to see the Album Artist details instead of Artist on the player screen, then that's what you will see. That's rather the point of that option. 

Andre

[zicimwaw]

This is a feature that is still missing. 

I'm using ';' between artists because the implementation works so well with Musicbee. I just recently organized all of my jazz albums to include all the musicans that play. It's a great way to go through my music. I wish this player had it as well because it's by far my favorite.

Related: if no album artist is present but just artist, that the artist name would be taken for the album artist. 

I hope this gets resolved soon

[Kundun]

So how can this be implemented effectively? Should we use a semicolon-separated list in the Artist tag and a general representive label in the Album Artist one?

Let's take the 1977 album Cluster & Eno, composed by the homonimous musicians. Basically everywhere (RYM / Discogs / MusicBrainz)  it is credited as it's titled (Cluster & Eno by Cluster & Eno), of course this isn't ideal, but what's the best solution to handle this case scenario? To just take the content of a single tag and split on ampersands is obviously a bad idea, since a lot of bands use them in their name (already highlighted by Andre), but without taking that in account this is also wrong since the album would be listed under Eno (insted of Brian Eno), creating a second inconsistency. So to just parse a single string is a suboptimal solution, and that's why I think that the combo solution with Album Artist/Artist tags is the way to go (of course I'm not reinventing the wheel, this is how a lot of players/platforms handles multiple artists), so for the sake of this example the artist tag of each track should be "Cluster; Brian Eno" and the Album Artist one "Cluster & Eno".

It has already been said how the Album Artist tag can be considered an additional grouping condition, so this one to me seems the most-straightforward way to implement this use case. Plus, this can be quite useful for genres that are very featurings-prone, even though I can see some edge cases so maybe to use other specific ID3 tags is a better idea.

On a small side note, can we avoid to use semicolons in the UI in general? They're just incredibly ugly, I'm not talking about the tagging-side, just the visualization, spaced forward slashes are way more organic on the eye. Just look at:

• Miles Davis; Sonny Rollins; Red Garland; Paul Chambers; Philly Joe Jones
• Miles Davis / Sonny Rollins / Red Garland / Paul Chambers / Philly Joe Jones

That may seems a futile detail but since we're here to talk, just my two cents.

 

Hope this will be implemented soon!

[andrewilley]

I think we're all in agreement that using "&" or "/" as default separators would be a VERY bad idea. IMHO the defaults should be  ";"  "//"  "\" and "\\" (and possibly also "feat." - yuck, but people do use it a lot) and let users add or change that list should they have any particular need to. Also multiple same-name Vorbis tags need to be supported, plus embedded null characters within ID3 T*** tags (as per the newer ID3v2.4 spec).

I see no reason why the Album Artist tag cannot support multiple names too, which someone suggested earlier. Admittedly it would be a rare usage, but I can't see it doing any harm for listing purposes as it would only trigger if anyone specifically edited their tags that way. However, it it important that the WHOLE original tag is always matched for its primary function of grouping disparate songs into albums. 

How people want to format their own tags is up to them. In your example, if you want to see an official combined entity plus the individual artist names, you could edit the tag to contain all three variants, e.g. "Cluster & Eno // Cluster // Brian Eno". Someone suggested adding a new option in Settings > Library >Lists to display only the first item of multiple artists within song lists and in the Player UI (in this case that would be just "Cluster & Eno"). Not something I'd probably use myself, but I can't see including it as an extra option would do any harm.

To your point on display formatting, why not use something that clearly shows that PA is showing separate items, rather than anything that could potentially be misunderstood as a whole tag? I suggest using blob/bullet as the visual separator, thus:

     Miles Davis ● Sonny Rollins ● Red Garland ● Paul Chambers ● Philly Joe Jones

Oh, and a related point while we're on a roll: where no Album Artist tag exists, the Artist tag should be used instead within the Album Artist category list (rather than filing such songs under 'Unknown Artist'). And for alpha sorting in lists, any 'Unknown xxxx' items should appear visually as an extra item at the end of the list, rather than being sorted in the middle of a long list under 'U'.

Andre

[Kundun]

I basically agree on everything you said, on the bullet separator too, so thank you for your contribution Andre

[MotleyG]

@andrewilley I think all of your points for the support of multiple Artist and AlbumArtist are valid. further comment on the unknown values though; not only should they be moved to the end, but also the option to exclude unknowns in any list would be great too.

Obviously this is a huge library database overhaul to accomplish this for @maxmp so I don't expect this will happen too soon. But if it is in the works, I would really hope it also includes the "Sort" tag functionality as well. This would really cap off the library options for me as a complete package.

[Xaphan]

5 hours ago, andrewilley said:

I think we're all in agreement that using "&" or "/" as default separators would be a VERY bad idea.

Hmm .. how?  In ID3, it looks like the separator is not "/". Should I upload files?

Edited November 30, 2020 by Xaphan

[MotleyG]

6 minutes ago, Xaphan said:

Hmm .. how?  In ID3, it looks like the separator is not "/". Should I upload files?

I don't really understand what you are asking here. The separator is what you define it to be for your library. I really don't recommend a single forward slash "/" without space " / " as this leads to issues with bands like "AC/DC" Love/Hate" etc. Regardless this is a user defined option that has been discussed. You can find similar discussions on the forum site for mp3tag, which is the tagging software in the screen shots you have posted.

[Xaphan]

1 minute ago, MotleyG said:

I don't really understand what you are asking here. The separator is what you define it to be for your library. I really don't recommend a single forward slash "/" without space " / " as this leads to issues with bands like "AC/DC" Love/Hate" etc. Regardless this is a user defined option that has been discussed. You can find similar discussions on the forum site for mp3tag, which is the tagging software in the screen shots you have posted.

No no no. This is a rhetorical question. I mean that in id3 the separator is not"/".

[MotleyG]

7 minutes ago, Xaphan said:

No no no. This is a rhetorical question. I mean that in id3 the separator is not"/".

But it is exactly that in the id3v2.3 spec. Regardless there are several implementations outside of the spec meant to help solve some limitations of that scope.

 

From the id3 official page;

TPE1

The 'Lead artist(s)/Lead performer(s)/Soloist(s)/Performing group' is used for the main artist(s). They are seperated with the "/" character.

[Xaphan]

11 minutes ago, MotleyG said:

But it is exactly that in the id3v2.3 spec. Regardless there are several implementations outside of the spec meant to help solve some limitations of that scope.

 

From the id3 official page;

TPE1

The 'Lead artist(s)/Lead performer(s)/Soloist(s)/Performing group' is used for the main artist(s). They are seperated with the "/" character.

Well here's a real example

AC_DC - Realize.mp3 KOTONOHOUSE - Euphoria (feat. TOFIE).mp3

[andrewilley]

23 minutes ago, MotleyG said:

But it is exactly that in the id3v2.3 spec.

And in v2.4 that was superseded, which now suggests using a null code. Using a single slash (with or without an enforced space) as a separator by default is just not a good idea. However the configuration facility would allow a user to enable if it they really wanted to. 

Andre

[andrewilley]

3 minutes ago, Xaphan said:

Well here's a real example

I don't understand what you are getting at. You seem to be using "AC/DC" as an example, which is actually one of the main reasons for NOT using a plain "/" character as a separator as that would cause their songs to be attributed to two bands, "AC" and "DC". Hence my original statement "I think we're all in agreement that using "&" or "/" as default separators would be a VERY bad idea"

Andre

[Xaphan]

14 minutes ago, andrewilley said:

I don't understand what you are getting at. You seem to be using "AC/DC" as an example, which is actually one of the main reasons for NOT using a plain "/" character as a separator as that would cause their songs to be attributed to two bands, "AC" and "DC". Hence my original statement "I think we're all in agreement that using "&" or "/" as default separators would be a VERY bad idea"

Andre

No, I'm saying about the ID3 standard. There is already a separation symbol and it does not interfere with writing AC/DC together. I don't know how to implement it, but I have an example where it is already implemented. Based on your comment, I got the impression that you want to ignore the standard

[MotleyG]

22 minutes ago, Xaphan said:

Based on your comment, I got the impression that you want to ignore the standard

Not at all, but there are some limitations. And although v2.4 has improved this, there are even fewer players today that support this still.

BTW - for AC/DC specifically in Windows, Microsoft actually has code written just for this band in WMP and even Explorer to avoid the separator issue. Funny how they felt it was easier to implement a work around rather than fix the problem!

[andrewilley]

1 hour ago, Xaphan said:

There is already a separation symbol and it does not interfere with writing AC/DC together.

There is, it was introduced in the v2.4 spec and uses a null character. Prior to that, "/" was recommended - but that of course broke "AC/DC" and any other band names which contained a slash character, unless those names were specifically whitelisted in code. The artist names in both of the sample files that you provided would end up being split by PA if it were to use "/" as a separator. 

Some apps, such as foobar2000, coded around this by requiring " / " (with a space either side) to act as a separator, which would be easy enough to implement.

The ID3 spec has never been too clever when it comes to consistency of textual separators, for example the original ID3v1 hard-coded Genres included:
29. Jazz+Funk
53. Pop-Folk
62. Pop/Funk

Andre

[Xaphan]

Early I was glad, AC\DC is an exception in MediaMonkey. Well, I don't think "/" is used anywhere other than id3. 

In my entire shopping history, I've only seen these signs (words):",", "feat.","ft.","w/", "with."

Edited November 30, 2020 by Xaphan

[martinkem]

Right there's support for multiple genres (which uses the following "; // :" to differentiate multiple genres) in the app and it doesn't screw up the library. 

 

How about doing something like that but for multiple artists. 

Multiple artists and smart playlists seem like low hanging fruits. Multiple artists can borrow from the already existing implementation of multiple genres. 

[andrewilley]

Of course, given that there are only two or three real-world cases of "/" occurring in a genuine band name ("AC/DC" and "+/-" are the only ones I've found) maybe the Microsoft approach of hard-coding those names as exceptions isn't such a bad idea after all. Does anyone know of any others?

Although the ID3v2.3 spec is kinda badly thought-out in this area, there must be some MP3 files in the wild that do use "/" as a real artist separator, and it'd be nice to be able to support them.

Andre

[MotleyG]

22 hours ago, MotleyG said:

… for AC/DC specifically in Windows, Microsoft actually has code written just for this band in WMP and even Explorer to avoid the separator issue.

One other thing I did to avoid issues with separators now and in the future for these bands with / in their names. I replaced the "/" with "∕"  (the Unicode U+2215, Division Slash). This made the names appear as expected but did not interfere with the forward slash.

Since there are only a couple of instances in practice to worry about, I felt in my case it was easier to do this than to try to move the mountain. Just a suggestion for others if it helps.

AC/DC --> AC∕DC

Edited December 1, 2020 by MotleyG