Multiple Artists

[Absinthequ]

12 hours ago, MotleyG said:

@Absinthequ I am not sure where you are going with your thoughts. The AlbumArtist tag wouldn't change, and I agree with that. 

@maxmp

This is an assumption as of right now. The developer is splitting album artists category as well so he may not have the ability to keep those options for this category to show Album Artist tag instead of artist tag in. If you think about splitting album artist tag and artist tag at the same time and tried to use the current show album artist instead of artist option this can create a bunch of anomalies. If you split album artist then which album artist does it show with the "show instead" options and how does it group albums? It would need to group and show using the tag as a whole and ignore the splitting yet keep the splitting in other instances. That's why i reiterated my examples of why it needs to continue to work with the "show instead"  options as i could see the developer removing these display options for the multiple artist categories to get it working.

I think the general assumption here is everything will work exactly as before except now we will have this new amazing feature like magic with no compromises. A feature that no one else on android has accomplished and the developer has avoided since 2013.

Poweramp should be able to display music how it is displayed everywhere else in the world and as normal people would expect it to. That's the whole point of feature requests. The constant robotic answer of "this is how Poweramp works... if you don't like it you don't have to use it" really puts people that come here off. That's a horrible attitude.

I know exactly how Poweramp works in not looking for a history lesson of how Poweramp works when requesting something. I have one of the most customized libraries there is.  I've been using multiple artists for years in Poweramp. I just use Genre by placing a Unicode character before each artist name. This allows me to use genre as normal a-z and then i can jump directly to the Unicode that shows up after after z and browse my multiple artists. Since genre shows as links in the info tag i also have the ability to jump to multiple artists in any song at any time already. It would just be nice to not have to add these to genre anymore and have a dedicated category. 

[andrewilley]

1 hour ago, Absinthequ said:

Poweramp should be able to display music how it is displayed everywhere else in the world and as normal people would expect it to.

[.....]

I just use Genre by placing a Unicode character before each artist name. This allows me to use genre as normal a-z and then i can jump directly to the Unicode that shows up after after z and browse my multiple artists.

Hmm.... So that'd be "just like everywhere else in the world" and "as normal people would expect it" then?    

No one is stopping you from creating your own ideas for how you want to sort your music collection. Personally, I use prefix numbers (years or just numeric indexes) in front of folder names for example. Any new features discussed here for handling multiple Artist names would be optional, you don't have to use them.

And no, the developer isn't splitting the Album Artists category. However if content creators and/or users have created their own multiple entries in the Album Artist metadata (such as by using multiple individual Vorbis tags, ID3 v2.4 null separators, or just plain old ASCII ";" characters) then the dev is offering to support that choice in the same way he recently started supporting multiple content in Genre tags.

If you don't want it, don't encode your metadata as separated items, or just don't use the new feature at all in PA, But if an Artist tag has been written as "Paul McCartney // Stevie Wonder" (or two names saved in separate ARTIST tags) rather than just "Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder", it does seem pretty obvious that the implied intention is that these are the names of two individual singers, not a combined group or a band name. For myself, I can see me finding split Artist tags useful, but I'll leave Album Artist alone.

Andre

[Absinthequ]

On 12/1/2020 at 11:12 AM, maxmp said:

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

- same for Album Artists

Is that not what he said? 

He requoted this on his update. 

The only part he scratched out was about there being "- normal Artists/Album Artists categories still exist in Library and can be used together with the new ones."

Edited February 14, 2021 by Absinthequ

[Absinthequ]

1 hour ago, andrewilley said:

But if an Artist tag has been written as "Paul McCartney // Stevie Wonder" (or two names saved in separate ARTIST tags) rather than just "Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder", it does seem pretty obvious that the implied intention is that these are the names of two individual singers, not a combined group or a band name. 

I agree. But when I click on Paul Simon to see an album list  I should see the correct artist listed under the album title that released that album. Not Paul Simon just because he was tagged on one song.

Edited February 14, 2021 by Absinthequ

[MotleyG]

If you don't want your AlbumArtist to be split, then simply don't include a separator in that tag.

[MotleyG]

2 minutes ago, Absinthequ said:

I agree. But when I click on Paul Simon to see an album list  I should see the correct artist listed under the album title that released that album. Not Paul Simon just because he was tagged on one song.

So as I said before, keep the AlbumArtist tag intact and displayed with the Album, even when using the split//separated Artist as the list or search term.

[Absinthequ]

lol. done.

[superluig164]

On 2/13/2021 at 12:32 AM, superluig164 said:

I do think this is getting a bit overcomplicated.  Just split the artist like Genres are already.  For album artists, maybe something else needs to be done, but I don't think it is in the same realm as splitting artists.  

For album artists I suppose they should just stay together unless there are multiple album tags, in which case I would personally see it best to have them progress in order.  For example if you have a song on a collection as well as an album, you could put the album as "album; collection" and the album artist as "artist; various artists" and Poweramp would see that they're in the same order and associate them accordingly.  I think that's a good solution personally.  It still keeps Poweramp's library management miles ahead of others without having to explain some complex system.

And if you're wondering "what if an album is by multiple artists as a whole" well, just put them in the tag together.  Keeping individual artists separate isn't really necessary for albums, I don't think, since the album will be shown under all artists who have contributions under it anyway (based on the track tags.)

Edit: and go ahead and put some toggles in settings, if you want.  I think splitting artists should be standard behaviour, maybe options for album artist splitting are warranted though.

All this confusion is precisely why I made this simple explanation...

[andrewilley]

5 hours ago, superluig164 said:

All this confusion is precisely why I made this simple explanation...

Agreed. I think this could very quickly get a lot more complicated than it really needs to be.

I personally still strongly prefer a simple on/off toggle for each tag type - Artist, Album Artist, Composer, Genre. The available library Categories list is already getting overcrowded, and adding 4-5 new ones seems excessive - especially if user then has to enable/disable their preferred categories from the Library's List Options too.

To avoid the Who Moved My Cheese? complaints and negative reviews on the Play Store - which Max is rightly concerned about - I think there should be a one-off prompt after installing the update asking if the user wants to enable this feature or not, which also says they can enable/disable it later in Settings.

I also very much doubt many people have many multiple items in Album Artist tags anyway - but if they do then it is presumably because that's what they want. Out of interest, I just checked all my own music files and I have no separator characters in Album Artist tags at all - apart from compound names like "Simon & Garfunkel" and "Adam & the Ants" but as "&" is not a separator symbol they would not get split anyway. So it actually wouldn't make any difference to me whether the feature is turned on or off for Album Artist. I did find a few Artist tags that needed tweaking though, so I've fixed those in readiness for this feature arriving.

Andre

[superluig164]

@andrewilleyI think your approach would be pretty much correct.  I still want to stress the album artist splitting to work the way I mentioned before, just because I really want to be able to tag songs with multiple albums and/or compilations.  Other than that I don't see anything else to say except to give Max a ping.

@maxmp

[andrewilley]

@superluig164 I'm pretty sure Max intends to allow splitting of multiple contents in Album Artist too, along with Composer. My comments above were only regarding my own music collection, for which I have no split Album Artist tags on my phone so I'd most likely be leaving that element unused. Actually, thinking about it, it wouldn't make any difference anyway, as if there are no matching separators in my songs then nothing would get split anyway.

Oh, and I did find some of my Artist tags were using "w/" (presumably for "with") as a splitting code, so perhaps that could be included in the initial default Artist separators list, as I can't see it having any genuine purpose within a single name. So I would propose the default separators list for Artists and Album Artists should be   " w/   //   /   \\   ;   feat.   ft. " (with AC/DC as a whitelisted exception in the underlying code). Probably best to avoid changing the existing default Genre symbols list though, as plain "/" could be used in legitimate combined entities such as "Rock/Pop", "Folk/Country", "Jazz/Funk, etc. 

Andre

[andrewilley]

For anyone subscribed to this thread who may have missed this elsewhere:

On 2/26/2021 at 6:51 AM, maxmp said:

The multiple artists, album artists, and composers, split by user defined separators, is already available in dev. builds, and this will be in the next beta - to be released soon. 

Albums grouping is the same, based on (unsplit) album artist or artist tag (if no album artist in the tags).

Andre

[andrewilley]

Multiple Artist feature now added to Poweramp build 899.

Note: There appears to be an issue with duplicated track titles showing in some category views, which I'm sure will be fixed for the next release, so you may prefer to wait for that one if you don't mainly use Folders, Artists, Albums, Genres, Years, Composers or Playlists.

Andre

[andrewilley]

Multiple Artists / Album Artists / Composers feature now seems to be fully working as of Poweramp build 900. Please could any existing subscribers to this thread give it a try now? The splitting feature is not yet enabled by default like it was for Genres, but the configuration options are in PA Settings > Library > Scanner:

Andre

 

[w3wilkes]

3 hours ago, andrewilley said:

Multiple Artists / Album Artists / Composers feature now seems to be fully working as of Poweramp build 900. Please could any existing subscribers to this thread give it a try now?

Andre

 

I have it enabled for both Artist and Album Artist using the semi colon as a delimiter since that's what I've used for years in LMS on my home stereo system. Seems to work perfectly. I got rid of the AC/DC exclusion because I don't use a single front slash as a delimiter so AC/DC works just the way it is without needing special handling. Thanks @maxmp !

[andrewilley]

The "no split" bit was a just-in-case thing, mainly for anyone who uses the ID3 v2.3 recommendation of using "/" as a separator. But if you don't use "/", AC/DC are safe.

Andre

[MotleyG]

For a long time I have been using a special set of characters (a short 6 em dash followed by a long solidus followed by another 6 em dash) as a replacement for the forward slash in the artist fields wherever necessary. Although Poweramp has this recent solution, many other players did not. This way I had the standard slash ready and available as a separator, perfect for this new solution since build 899. This works in all applications I've used them in, even my old iPod classic and car stereo player via USB stick. The three I needed are below if you want to try a copy/paste for your own use.

AC ∕ DC   + ∕ -   Love ∕ Hate

Edit: Maybe it is the forum text, but in all other applications the spacing between the slash and text is much smaller. Anyhow, use as you see fit if it helps.

Edited March 20, 2021 by MotleyG

[PrinceMojo]

Thank you dev(s) for the new build with multiple artist functionality.

Couple things to address:

1. How do we define a null character as the separator? Mp3tag converts "\\" to null character from my understanding, which is the spec for the delimiter in id3v2.4. I suspect Mp3tag encodes null for id3v2.3 as well even though it would be out of spec (possibly because id3v2.3 doesn't support multiple artists, but encodes it anyway hoping the player supports it). Right now anything I encoded with "\\" in Mp3tag doesn't show up properly in Poweramp.
2. Another issue is if we want to use " / " as the separator (note the spaces before and after the forward-slash as in the foobar2000 standard). Poweramp removes the spaces when I try to add it so " / " becomes "/". Technically "/" does work as the seperator, but we would have to use the whitelist in cases such as AC/DC (which already is entered by default, very nice).

Edit: I forgot to mention that I also tested ";" which works perfectly. The above 2 separators are the ones I have problems with at the moment.

Edited June 11, 2021 by PrinceMojo

[andrewilley]

@PrinceMojo Yes, there is a known PA bug with null characters within ID3 tags at the moment. They aren't recognised correctly by the file scanner and are instead interpreted as spaces. Encoding-wise, a null character should consist of one or two zero-bytes, depending on whether the file uses 8-bit ASCII or Unicode.

Spec-wise, a slash ( "/" ) was the recommended simple separator for multiple entries within tags up to ID3 v2.3. Hence the addition of the whitelist option for the very few cases where using a slash causes issues - "AC/DC" being the most obvious, but also things like "+/-" and "Love/Hate". Whitespaces before or after any separator characters are correctly trimmed, just like they are at the start or end of single strings. If you really, really need to treat "/" separately from the whitespace-padded " / " version, use a similar-looking Unicode character to avoid confusion - e.g. U+2044 (" ⁄ " Fraction Slash), U+2215 (" ∕ " Division Slash), U+29F8 (" ⧸ " Big Solidus), etc.

As you say, the null-byte option was added in ID3 v2.4, and technically should only exist there, but in the wild it's in v2.3 tags too. I've tended to avoid it though, and I use " ; " almost exclusively - apart from a few cases where terms like "feat." or "ft." were already considered correct.

For my own purposes, I settled on the following. The brackets are to cover entries formatted as "XXX (feat. YYY)", as I'd prefer to see them as-is rather than editing them. The vast majority of my multi-tagged entries use semicolon though.

Andre

[andrewilley]

On 6/11/2021 at 9:03 AM, andrewilley said:

Yes, there is a known PA bug with null characters within ID3 tags at the moment. They aren't recognised correctly by the file scanner and are instead interpreted as spaces. Encoding-wise, a null character should consist of one or two zero-bytes, depending on whether the file uses 8-bit ASCII or Unicode.

@maxmp I just checked this again in build 910, and null separators in ID3 Artist (and other) tags are still not being recognised by the scanner. For example, the following TPE1 Artist tag is misread as a single concatenated UTF-8 string "David Bowie Mick Jagger", instead of two separate artists "David Bowie" and "Mick Jagger".

Tag 'TPE1' (53 bytes):
0014: 01 ff fe 44 00 61 00 76 00 69 00 64 00 20 00 42 [...D.a.v.i.d. .B]
0024: 00 6f 00 77 00 69 00 65 00 00 00 ff fe 4d 00 69 [.o.w.i.e.....M.i]
0034: 00 63 00 6b 00 20 00 4a 00 61 00 67 00 67 00 65 [.c.k. .J.a.g.g.e]
0044: 00 72 00 00 00                                  [.r...]

Andre

[maxmp]

@andrewilley could you please send me this exactly track to gpmaxmpz@gmail.com? In theory, the null char should be replaced by /, and / can be set as splitting char.

[andrewilley]

11 minutes ago, maxmp said:

@andrewilley could you please send me this exactly track to gpmaxmpz@gmail.com? In theory, the null char should be replaced by /, and / can be set as splitting char.

Sure, I'll email you the test file I created. [Sent]

Personally, I would suggest that any null-character split strings are intended to always be treated as separated individual names - in the same way that multiple individual ARTIST tags in Vorbis files should always be treated as separate items rather than ever getting concatenated. This is regardless of whether the user has set up any separator symbols for regular string splitting.

Andre

[djcoolherc55]

@maxmp

I agree with @andrewilley  and just wanted to say that I have been waiting a long time for this feature and I look forward to it when it is implemented!
NULL-character separators are part of the ID3v2.4 specification: https://id3.org/id3v2.4.0-frames

[andrewilley]

@djcoolherc55 There do seem to be instances in the wild of null separators appearing in ID3 v2.3 files too, but I agree that they should still be handled within either format.

It does seem logical to me that if a file does contain specifically pre-separated names - either by using multiple individual ARTIST tags in Vorbis, or null-separated strings in ID3 - then that intent should be respected and adhered to in Poweramp, regardless of any other Split Symbol settings.

For eventual display purposes (such as on the player screen or in song lists) it could be made obvious that such individual Artist names are genuinely separate entities rather than being split from a longer piece of text. My earlier suggestion for such songs was to use a district symbol between the names - such as a blob, e.g. "Bing Crosby ● David Bowie" - rather than interspersing them with normal characters like semicolons or slashes.

Andre 

[andrewilley]

The issue of null-byte separators being ignored has been worked around in PA build 911. They now work correctly, but ONLY if you have semicolon set up as one of the 'Symbols to Split Multiple Artists' in the Scanner settings.

Personally I do still agree with @djcoolherc55 and @PrinceMojo that the presence of null-byte separators - or of multiple individual ARTIST Vorbis tags - should automatically be recognised and handled regardless of whether the user has defined any Artist Splitting Symbols at all. If such a tag unambiguously defines that there is meant to be more than one name, then those names should always be processed in lists as separate items.

To avoid complicating the code any further, perhaps any instances of multiple tags or null-separated strings could internally be concatenated using some unique Unicode character (such as U+25CF, padded either side with a space) which will always be processed as an additional, invisible to the user, splitting symbol. That way the process would still function correctly even where the user has not defined any Split Symbols of their own.

Andre