Multiple artist/genre tag support!

[null]

54 minutes ago, andrewilley said:

otherwise it should be the Artist tag taken from the first song in the list. If that song has two artists listed, I guess the first one ought to be one displayed?

No, I disagree (as usual...)
All artists on the release should be aggregated into the credits. That would give trouble when displaying it, but displaying only the first artist and discarding the rest feels like a disservice to the person who tagged the tracks in the first place.

If displaying all of them is not an option, I would rather neither be shown. In that case expect the user to add an albumartist tag and don't falsely interpret the tags in the meantime.

Also, displaying the most appearing artist on the album is an option. It's not like code can't calculate that, and I reckon it's not particularly hard either. Actually I'm pretty sure it's not hard at all, even though I can't code.

[andrewilley]

27 minutes ago, null said:

Also, displaying the most appearing artist on the album is an option.

That's not a bad idea at all.

However if there's isn't a common artist, and there's no Album Artist tag (and anyone who spends time creating neat tags files should added that anyway) then picking an artist from the first song (as there's no other options left) is more sensible than listing 25+ names. But all of these situations will only apply when (a) there are lots of tracks are all by different artists AND (b) there is no Album Artist tag. That situation should ideally never happen, so we're just talking about an uncommon fallback option.

Andre

[null]

4 minutes ago, andrewilley said:

However if there's isn't a common artist, and there's no Album Artist tag (and anyone who spends time creating neat tags files should added that anyway) then picking an artist from the first song (as there's no other options left) is more sensible than listing 25+ names.

In that case listing it as exactly "Various Artists" is a better option I think, seeing as the MusicBrainz standard is that. MusicBrainz is very popular. Trust MusicBrainz.

[andrewilley]

1 hour ago, null said:

In that case listing it as exactly "Various Artists" is a better option

Excellent idea. I would propose the 'artist' field underneath an Album header is derived by:

1) Album Artist tag, if one is present in any of the songs ;
2) Artist tag, if any one name is present in (say) at least 75% of the tracks ;
3) If there is no Album Artist and no particularly common individual artist name, simply show "Various Artists".

Andre

[null]

For a fallback that's pretty advanced. Sounds good to me, but again, as a fallback.

[maxmp]

3 hours ago, andrewilley said:

IMHO, if the Artist tag contains several individual items then that is how they should be displayed, one by one, rather than as a combined entity

In Poweramp the only place where this is possible is Info/Tags popup - so each artist will navigate to separate category if the option enabled.

[wvan]

I assume with this change there still won't be a way to navigate  (browse) from:  genre -> artist -> album

It seems like everyone thinks you should browse "genre"s by going directly from:  genre -> album,  but if you have many hundreds or thousands of albums, it's just not practical.  That was part of my original request in this thread so long ago.

[null]

1 minute ago, wvan said:

It seems like everyone thinks you should browse "genre"s by going directly from:  genre -> album

I don't think that. That sounds silly when I think of my library.

But if it's possible, the option has to be there. It would not work for me, but I assume it would for at least some of the userbase of the app.

But anyways, the logical thought I have goes genre>track rather than genre>album>track, so I think that is more important first. It's already there though, so not relevant here.

[Absinthequ]

7 hours ago, andrewilley said:

IMHO, if the Artist tag contains several individual items then that is how they should be displayed, one by one, rather than as a combined entity. If you do want to see the combined version in your lists, then include that wording in the tag. For example, to use the modern trend of using "feat" instead of "and" (still kinda yuck, by the way) you would set a tag of "Eminem feat. Dr Dre ; Eminem ; Dr. Dre" to make it appear in all three forms.

The artist wording shown at the top of an Album view ought be always Album Artist if that tag exists, otherwise it should be the Artist tag taken from the first song in the list. If that song has two artists listed, I guess the first one ought to be one displayed? (so if that first song has "Eminem; Dr. Dre" then the album info header should show the artist as "Eminem" not "Dr Dre". But normally, the Album Artist tag should be used in preference though). 

Andre

I agree.

I actually tag my "feat Dr. Dre" after the song title. So if I clicked on Dr. Dre. I would want to see "Eminem - The Marshal Mathers Lp" listed as an album because Eminem is my album artist. Then when I click the album I'll see a song listed as "Song title feat Dr. Dre"  and that will also be what I'm seeing in the player. Both song list view and player will also show "Eminem - The Marshal Mathers Lp" underneath like normal.

Ideally this is how I would love this to work with the artist tag "Eminem; Dr. Dre"

[wvan]

4 hours ago, null said:

I don't think that. That sounds silly when I think of my library.

But if it's possible, the option has to be there. It would not work for me, but I assume it would for at least some of the userbase of the app.

But anyways, the logical thought I have goes genre>track rather than genre>album>track, so I think that is more important first. It's already there though, so not relevant here.

And this is why I long ago gave up on the genre/artist/album hierarchy and just switched to browsing by folder.  If I can't go from say:  Classical -> Beethoven, Ludwig van -> Symphony 7, then it just doesn't work for me.  Funny, the Logitech/SlimDevices music server handled it fine almost 20 years ago.

[Absinthequ]

I would prefer genre->artist->album 

[andrewilley]

I would go with Genre > Artist > Album too, but with the caveat that if there is only one album for a given artist, it should drill down directly into the album view rather than showing the extra Artist level (containing just one item) first.

Andre

[superluig164]

Hey look, what do you know, I agree with Andre again.

[LABB]

Jesus Christ, I have always wanted this feature. I have looked everywhere for a media player that supports it properly. I finally found one on Linux: it's called Lollypop and it's open source.

However, I really want to see it on Poweramp since it's my favorite player on Android... 

Basically there are some Vorbis tags that can have multiple instances of a type on the files, such as multiple album artists, artists, genres, composers, etc. From what I see, this is not supported yet, because Poweramp actually ignores everything after the first tag it reads. This affects FLAC files which is most of my library.

On mp3s which is a small part of my library I use Poweramp to split genres since I think mp3s doesn't have this ability of multiple instances of a tag. I really want to have the option to split other tags though.

[LABB]

The idea is that an album or song with multiple artists have this information on lists and while playing songs, while also separating the artists on the artists list so we can find the songs they participate when we access their individual pages.

[w3wilkes]

1 hour ago, LABB said:

I have looked everywhere for a media player that supports it properly. I finally found one on Linux: it's called Lollypop and it's open source.

Logitech Media Server (LMS) fully supports multiple Artist and Album Artist along with multiple Genre. Multiple vorbis tags, MP3 or about any other media file type tags. LMS runs on just about everything except Android and is free and open source. For the home stereo this is my goto since the renderer is separate from the server so I can drive multiple stereo's from a single server and play different streams at each renderer or sync 2 or more renderers and still play separate streams on the un-sync'd renderers. Control can be done from any browser on your network or dedicated control aps available for Android and iOS.

[andrewilley]

7 hours ago, LABB said:

Basically there are some Vorbis tags that can have multiple instances of a type on the files

Yes, the Vorbis spec allows for multiple instances of the same tag item - but unfortunately the much more common ID3 format does not. Hence the logic of defining some specific separator character or sequence of characters (in the same way Genre is currently split) to do the job. They codes will be user-editable, but I think the default ought to be to provide at least "//"  ";"  "\" and "\\", all of which I've seen in the wild - and maybe even "|", the bar character?

I'm sure that when Max implements such a facility for multiple Artist names (which presumably will also apply to the Composer tag while he's at it?) he will allow for the Vorbis multiple-tag method, as well as separator characters occurring in either format. 

Personally I very much doubt that multiple Album Artist tags will ever be supported in PA though, as that tag is used in the app as a unique identifier to combine multiple songs by different artists together to form the concept of an album.

Andre

[LABB]

14 hours ago, andrewilley said:

Personally I very much doubt that multiple Album Artist tags will ever be supported in PA though, as that tag is used in the app as a unique identifier to combine multiple songs by different artists together to form the concept of an album.

Well, if an album has multiple album artists, it can be grouped if all the tracks has the same exact album artists. I don't see why not this would be done, but hey, if this feature gets implemented with artists tag only, I think it would already be enough for most people.

[LABB]

20 hours ago, w3wilkes said:

Logitech Media Server (LMS) fully supports multiple Artist and Album Artist along with multiple Genre. Multiple vorbis tags, MP3 or about any other media file type tags. LMS runs on just about everything except Android and is free and open source. For the home stereo this is my goto since the renderer is separate from the server so I can drive multiple stereo's from a single server and play different streams at each renderer or sync 2 or more renderers and still play separate streams on the un-sync'd renderers. Control can be done from any browser on your network or dedicated control aps available for Android and iOS.

I've never heard of it, but thanks! I'll definitely look into it, since I'm not 100% satisfied with Lollypop. The server side of it really seems to be a good idea. Maybe I can run something like that over here.

[LABB]

14 hours ago, andrewilley said:

I'm sure that when Max implements such a facility for multiple Artist names (which presumably will also apply to the Composer tag while he's at it?) he will allow for the Vorbis multiple-tag method, as well as separator characters occurring in either format.

That's what I'm counting on! I really only use album artist, artist and genre tags for that purpose, but I guess there are more tags out there that uses the multiple-tag feature.

[wvan]

On 6/8/2020 at 7:03 PM, w3wilkes said:

Logitech Media Server (LMS) fully supports multiple Artist and Album Artist along with multiple Genre. Multiple vorbis tags, MP3 or about any other media file type tags. LMS runs on just about everything except Android and is free and open source. For the home stereo this is my goto since the renderer is separate from the server so I can drive multiple stereo's from a single server and play different streams at each renderer or sync 2 or more renderers and still play separate streams on the un-sync'd renderers. Control can be done from any browser on your network or dedicated control aps available for Android and iOS.

Finding an Android music player that has the same support as LMS has always been my goal... it just made perfect sense for how I want to access my music library.  But mostly I stopped using LMS once I stopped using squeezeboxes.

[w3wilkes]

On 6/10/2020 at 3:44 PM, wvan said:

Finding an Android music player that has the same support as LMS has always been my goal... it just made perfect sense for how I want to access my music library.  But mostly I stopped using LMS once I stopped using squeezeboxes.

I continue to use LMS for my home. I have a Boom and a couple of Duets along with some Raspberry Pi's with HifiBerry DAC's. The other beauty of LMS is Music files are delivered either via WiFi or ethernet bit perfect from the server to the renderers and decoded by the renderer. For HiDef I don't have to worry about some OS upgrade or change affecting HiDef since it is decoded at the renderer.

I will say that for my phone Poweramp comes closest to LMS from a function perspective. The new Material skin for LMS makes the interface more like Poweramp. The biggest difference from a function perspective is LMS works like the Poweramp Queue without the other PA play method. It wouldn't bother me at all if PA had a setting to make all playback work through the Queue and give the ability to Add to Queue next or the end of the Queue which are all doable in LMS along with the ability to rearrange via drag and drop.