Multiple Artists

[MotleyG]

3 minutes ago, MotleyG said:

AC/DC --> AC∕DC

Also, this works in all of my current players. In both Win 7 and Win 10 it is displaying in iTunes and WMP, all apps on IOS, and on Android as well.

[maxmp]

To summarize a bit, following is planned (short term, next beta builds):

- additional optional Artists category, formed by splitting with user defined string (for example, “\”)

- same for Album Artists

- other categories are not affected, for example albums are still based on complete unsplit artist tag

- normal Artists/Album Artists categories still exist in Library  and can be used together with the new ones

[MotleyG]

4 minutes ago, maxmp said:

To summarize a bit, following is planned (short term, next beta builds):

- additional optional Artists category, formed by splitting with user defined string (for example, “\”)

- same for Album Artists

- other categories are not affected, for example albums are still based on complete unsplit artist tag

- normal Artists/Album Artists categories still exist in Library  and can be used together with the new ones

Woohoo! 🤘

[andrewilley]

I really don't think even more categories are needed - there are probably already too many artist-oriented ones to be honest (Artists, Album Artists, and Albums by Artist). Just a simple switch somewhere (Settings > Library > Scanner ?) to turn the splitting feature on or off if you feel that is necessary. And some - e.g. Vorbis multiple tags - should probably never be combined.

After all, there aren't separate categories for 'Genres' and 'Genres-split', it just works.

Andre

[MotleyG]

15 minutes ago, andrewilley said:

I really don't think even more categories are needed

Maybe until the initial betas are tested and verified to work as planned for the majority? So it doesn't blow other things up?

[maxmp]

@andrewilley it's optional and you can switch between them or have both. Believe me, there are very "vocal" users, esp. in Play comments which will dislike feature if we change existing category.

[andrewilley]

40 minutes ago, MotleyG said:

Maybe until the initial betas are tested and verified to work as planned for the majority? So it doesn't blow other things up?

Yes, that could be a point. Create new 'beta' categories for an initial testing period, which users will need to enable to see. Then after a few months of testing switch the main categories over to support the split tags. As long as there's a switch in case some users don't want it to happen - not sure why, but there's bound to be someone.

But having five different artist-oriented categories long term would be too confusing, especially for new users. It seems to work fine for Genres.

Andre

[andrewilley]

@maxmp A suggestion to avoid ending up with over-confusing category choices if you feel that forcing multiple item parsing by default would cause user complaints:

Add a simple option in Settings to enable/disable parsing for Artists/AlbumArtists/Composers. This should be turned OFF by default for upgrades, but turned ON by default for new users. Turning it on should remind the user of what it does and to do to a Full Rescan.

To ensure it is obvious when split items are being displayed for any given track, use blob characters as visual separators (as per my earlier summary post, https://forum.powerampapp.com/topic/16489-multiple-artists/?do=findComment&comment=92012 ). This should also be used when a file-read has forced multiple names, rather than the tag containing a single text-delimited string (e.g. for duplicate Vorbis tags, or ID3v2.4 T*** tags containing null character separators).

Andre

[megatavi]

Can there be like a "+" button to just add each artist or composer at a time? 

I'm not sure how that works with the metadata or compatibility with other apps and all that, but just a suggestion.

[andrewilley]

2 hours ago, megatavi said:

Can there be like a "+" button to just add each artist or composer at a time? 

When you are editing song info/tags, just separate the individual names with whatever character you have preset (such as ";" or "//").

Andre

[Absinthequ]

I find it more confusing and time consuming to search the settings to enable a function just to test how it works. Like customizing skins and "view album artist instead of artist"  options. It seems much quicker and easier to find the way Max is talking about setting it up.

There's lots of confusing options in Poweramp. The best way to understand them is to test them out. 

Some people will actually prefer to have both versions enabled at the same time also. I would like both. 

Not adding advanced features because dumb people exist should never be an option. That's what they make an iphone for. For the easily confused people. 8P

 

Edited December 5, 2020 by Absinthequ

[Xaphan]

Apologies for the sharpness. Maybe in the beginning it is worth making support at the standards level? And then we'll discuss additional features of the parser?

[zicimwaw]

Here's an example implementation of the work already done for Musicbee. I don't think it needs to be reinvented, and the closer the tagging aligns with how other programs do it, the more straight forward it should be right? But as mentioned earlier, why not have the possible value be ';' or '/' and what is most commonly used. 

Furthermore as I said earlier, if no album artist is present, the artist tag should be taken automatically and vice versa. That is for some reason also not the case in Poweramp at the moment. 

https://musicbee.fandom.com/wiki/Tagging#Multiple_Value_Tags
 

Quote

Each value is separated using a semicolon (;).

[...]

It's rare, but if you have an artist with a semicolon in the name, you can use a Lisu tone character instead, to keep the the tag from being split. Just copy and paste this character in place of the semicolon: ꓼ

 

[andrewilley]

2 hours ago, zicimwaw said:

 But as mentioned earlier, why not have the possible value be ';' or '/' and what is most commonly used. 

You will be able to set your own choices anyway, we are only discussing a basic default set that won't annoy anyone unduly - such as  ";"   "//"   "\"  and  "\\" , with maybe "feat." and "ft." in there for good measure. Although bizarrely those last two often appear at the end of song titles rather than in the artist name - what's that about?!

I actually now really like the option of including simple "/" as a default too, because it was originally suggested in the ID3v2.3 spec before v2.4 came out so ought to be supported. But it would need hard-coding written for the two or three known exceptions such as "AC/DC" and "+/-".

For display purposes everywhere though (including all lists and the player screen) I think bullet symbols are definitely the way to go, to indicate that the displayed wording is built up from separate content rather than being a verbatim single entity from a tag. Such as Little Drummer Boy by "David Bowie ● Bing Crosby".  The same symbol should also be used when displaying any combined Genre and Composer fields too. Original unsplit tags tags (containing ";" "\\" or whatever) should never be displayed anywhere except in the Tag Editor, IMHO.

I still personally don't like the idea of this facility being controlled by adding even more new Categories though, there are enough already and adding more will simply make the app even more confusing for new users - especially if any of them are hidden by default. A new Category wasn't needed (or even asked for) when Genre splitting was introduced, it was simply a new feature which worked automatically unless the user decided to disable it by removing the separator characters in Settings > Library > Scanner. I think splitting of Artists should work the same way, and be enabled by default but with a one-time warning prompt after upgrading, something like: "Poweramp now supports separation of multiple artist names for songs. You will need to do a Full Rescan for this to work, and the feature can be disabled in Settings > Library > Scanner"  

Andre

[Absinthequ]

On 12/17/2020 at 7:02 AM, andrewilley said:

with maybe "feat." and "ft." in there for good measure. Although bizarrely those last two often appear at the end of song titles rather than in the artist name - what's that about?!

This is exactly how I know the developer and admin does NOT listen to Hip Hop. Multiple Artists would have been developed years ago, if they did.

This is done for the same reason i've been doing this for years: no Multiple artists support in the Artist field.

If you listen to primarily hip hop, nearly every album will have half a dozen to two dozen features randomly throughout the album. All of that is normally tagged in the Artist field. So just looking at one album results in that many separate listings for artists. Adding an artist like Eminem or Dr. Dre in Poweramp, is a ridiculous amount of congestion with no cohesiveness (in certain categories). It renders those categories unusable. You could have 1000 albums in your library, but you'll end up with 10,000 listings. To get around this, you have to move your featured artists into the song title.

This also renders the Composer category completely useless for me or anyone who listens to hip hop. If you have one hip hop album with 15 songs, you're most likely getting 15 different composer assortments just for that album alone. It may have 1 producer on each song, but co-produced by someone different each time. 1000 songs in your hip hop library will result in close to 1000 listings for composer. LOL I am exaggerating a bit but it's not a usable category for Hip Hop libraries (without multiple composer support). I'm not too concerned with this category working with Multiple Composer option as it would take a ridiculous amount of time to find information on each song and get them tagged correctly (especially for hip hop, if info is even available). I usually remove all of the composers and only leave my favorites, just so the category is usable for me.

 

Edited December 20, 2020 by Absinthequ

[andrewilley]

@Absinthequ Out of mild curiosity, I just checked my 7,000+ song library and you're right - not a sign of any Hips, Hops, or any combinations thereof. Nor Rap. Nor even Reggae. I do have a few songs mis-tagged as R&B if that helps - although personally I rather suspect that Tasmin Archer's beautiful "Sleeping Satellite" is not R&B. Nor is Owl City's "Fireflies". 

However specific genres are really not relevant here, as any song from any genre can feature multiple artists, and thus it currently generates assorted one-off concatenated entries in the Artists list. I suspect classical music might be especially prone too, as there might be an orchestra with a different soloist for each track. So it's most definitely not a specific R&B issue, and I think everyone here is already in agreement that support for multiple artist would be a great idea - and a couple of weeks ago Max said it will be introduced very soon, including multiple Composers too I believe:

Andre

[Absinthequ]

Obviously any genre can feature artists...  my library consists of over  13,000 songs and roughly 40% is hip hop and the rest being some form of rock. I would have to say nearly every hip hop album has at least 6 or more multiple artists features where maybe one out of five rock albums features one single multiple artist feature on average. The genres are not really even in the same ball park. 

There's really a major difference in library congestion when you have albums that have features on nearly half the songs versus 1 feature every few albums. 

Edited December 20, 2020 by Absinthequ

[zicimwaw]

On 12/20/2020 at 1:16 PM, Absinthequ said:

This is exactly how I know the developer and admin does NOT listen to Hip Hop. Multiple Artists would have been developed years ago, if they did.

This is done for the same reason i've been doing this for years: no Multiple artists support in the Artist field.

This also renders the Composer category completely useless for me or anyone who listens to hip hop. If you have one hip hop album with 15 songs, you're most likely getting 15 different composer assortments just for that album alone. It may have 1 producer on each song, but co-produced by someone different each time. 1000 songs in your hip hop library will result in close to 1000 listings for composer. LOL I am exaggerating a bit but it's not a usable category for Hip Hop libraries (without multiple composer support). I'm not too concerned with this category working with Multiple Composer option as it would take a ridiculous amount of time to find information on each song and get them tagged correctly (especially for hip hop, if info is even available). I usually remove all of the composers and only leave my favorites, just so the category is usable for me.

 

This is why the album artist tag is used as well as Artist. Album artist is who made the album, and artist has room to be anyone on the album. Composer can be who wrote the song, can be particularly useful in jazz or classical music, but also in pop or anywhere where a song may be covered if you want to keep track of it. For me, I haven't put the work into my music library for it. 

This still works great even when listening to hip-hop. You may have "10,000" artists, but you won't have that many album artists. I have 619 jazz albums alone, not to mention other genres, so I understand the pains of managing that much music. That's what makes the multiple artist so useful. 

Multiple artists would be useable for Hip hop, it is genre irrelevant. That way you could see, for example, all songs that anderson paak was on, even though he's on album with mac miller for example. However, if you want to see the albums both respectively put out, that would be under album artist. 

[hhh]

I don't understand how this isn't standard. There are so many songs with multiple artists, and there are albums with multiple album artists as well. How is it that desktop applications are able to get this right, yet Poweramp can't? I really want to understand why a feature seemingly so simple can't be implemented.

[Kundun]

Seemingly so simple? Several edge cases have been listed above, I don't see this feature as simple from an implementation point of view as a lot of users defined it to be honest.

[MotleyG]

11 hours ago, hhh said:

I don't understand how this isn't standard. There are so many songs with multiple artists, and there are albums with multiple album artists as well. How is it that desktop applications are able to get this right, yet Poweramp can't? I really want to understand why a feature seemingly so simple can't be implemented.

What desktop app has this down correctly, and given the multiple use cases requested, which is addressed? Other than the current applied tag standards of AlbumArtist and Artist, I don't think there are too many mainstream examples. There are some tagging apps that do correctly allow adding multiple Artist tags, as per the standard. But support from actual media players is sadly lacking to display and sort them beyond the first tag. And there are none that I am aware of on any mobile platform as of yet. I'm sure if it was as easy as you suggest, it would be done and published already.

I'll wait for @maxmp to add it to Poweramp. In the meantime I'll continue to use it with what it does best today.

[w3wilkes]

3 hours ago, MotleyG said:

What desktop app has this down correctly, and given the multiple use cases requested, which is addressed?

I believe Logitech Media Server (LMS) does this correctly and as far as tagging goes MP3Tag is fully capable of creating tags of multiple Artists / Album Artists.

[MotleyG]

12 minutes ago, w3wilkes said:

I believe Logitech Media Server (LMS) does this correctly and as far as tagging goes MP3Tag is fully capable of creating tags of multiple Artists / Album Artists.

Yes, very aware of mp3tag as it is my prefered tagging software. But the point was more about the player support. LMS isn't exactly mainstream, and certainly doesn't apply to mobile platforms.

[andrewilley]

As has been repeated many times, multiple Artist tags - along with Composer, Album Artist, etc - are somewhat variable both in terms of their embedding standards (different in ID3 v2.3, v2.4 and Vorbis/APE for example), editing/creation methods (such as in MP3Tag, TagScanner, and others) and also in terms of their currently rather limited implementation in audio players (even most PC players don't support them, either at all or very well).

So yes, it would be great, and yes it is coming soon (see earlier in this thread) but PA is by no means at the back of an established pack.

Andre

[superluig164]

Just some input, could we have the option to use "/" as a separator if it does get implemented?  I personally do not have any artists in my library at all with "/" in their names, and I use "/" as my separator everywhere else, so I want them to be the same for the sake of consistency.  Even if this is not enabled by default, it would be very nice to have it enableable using a toggle switch in Settings.