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How does PA handle multiple artists?


monkeybutt

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I have a couple of songs with tags that contain several artists and it looks like this:

Singer 1; Singer 2

in the ID3 tag

how does PA handle this? does it only shows Singer 1 as the leading one? or it'll treat Singer 1 and Singer 1; Singer 2 as different artists? because it'll be mixed with singular artists and the ones s/he do featuring with.

I want to make so the tag shows Singer 1 - Title (feat. Singer 2) instead, but there are too many files for me to bother with this nitpick...

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My other music system that I use for my home stereo supports multiple artists in tags just fine so I have a bunch of music that has "singer1;singer2" in the artist and album artist tags. Poweramp just treats it as a single artist "singer1;singer2" which is separate from either. so if you have a library composed of just "singer1" and "singer2" and then have some music with both artists and your tag is "singer1;singer2", your library will now show 3 artisits, "singer1", "singer2" and "singer1;singer2". That's the way it currently works.

I fully wish that PA would support multiple artists in tags just like it supports multiple genres in tags!

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I know there has been a lot of demand for this, and I must admit that even I thought it was a feature that was just round the corner (akin to multiple Genres) rather than "if ever".

My own view on the matter - for what it's worth - is that detecting ";" or "//" as an Artist separator, even by default, would not break many existing collections - unlike splitting by "," or "&" which would be a bad idea. Using that naming structure would appear to be a fairly deliberate indication on the part of the user that they do wish to separate those names. Of course it is equally pretty obvious that no one would want "Adam & the Ants", or "AC/DC", or "Crosby, Stills & Nash" to get split into separate names. However it would seem more logical for collaborations such as the Xmas classic Little Drummer Boy to be shown individually in the artist lists for both Bing Crosby and David Bowie, rather the current situation of appearing in neither of their lists and only appearing as a unique joined name assigned to just that one track. If would of course be up to the user to define that Artist tag as "Bing Crosby ; David Bowie" to make that happen though.

Also, now that the Album Artist tag is supported, that newer tag should always be used (where present of course) when joining album tracks, overriding the Track Artist tag. To be honest, I feel that the current category choices of "Artist", "Album Artist", and "Albums by Artist" are a bit confusing and overkill, and more automated use of the Album Artist tag (falling back to the Artist tag only when necessary) would make the process more elegant and user-friendly. 

Andre

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  • 3 weeks later...

Hard agree. I've manually retagged every music file I have to use ";" as an artist delimiter and I tell all my music apps to only use that character as an artist delimiter. As long as you have the ability to retag your tracks, and manually select the delimiter chars, no issues can be made with adding the ability to add multiple artists seperation in tags. I bought PA yesterday and so far this is my only gripe. 

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