Delimiters (symbols) for multiple artists / album artists

[Zedniac]

Poweramp already has functionality in which it can parse multiple genres in one field if they are split up with specific characters (Library > Scanner > Symbols to Split Multiple Genres). What I would like is a feature that does the same for artists and album artists. My desktop player, MusicBee, supports multiple artists in a field with use of the semicolon. For example, if the artist field for a song looks like "A$AP Mob; A$AP Rocky; Tyler, The Creator; Playboi Carti; Yung Gleesh" then that track will appear under the artists A$AP Mob, A$AP Rocky, etc.

Hopefully this could be implemented, and like the genre split function, allow you to use the delimiter character of your choice.

[andrewilley]

That feature is planned for Artists at some point in the future, but I'm not sure how well it would work for the Album Artist tag because the whole tag needs to be unique in order to create the match needed to connect all of the songs from one album together.

Andre

[rezme]

@andrewilley Is there any way to be notified when specific features make it into the product, or do you have to read the changelog for each update?

[andrewilley]

@rezme You need to read the changelogs that appear every time the app updates, or actively follow the forum discussions here.

You use the 'Notify me of replies' feature at the bottom of any thread, but then you'll get emails when people post '+1' comments etc. There's also no guarantee that any given older post will be updated when a feature does get implemented, as people often start multiple threads about the same subject and it's hard (and mostly redundant) to track back and update every old thread when something changes.

Andre

[Sascha Kiss]

FooBar has an option to parse multiple artists and album artists separated by semicolon. An artist such as „Me; You“ would appear under „Me“ and „You“ rather than under „Me; You“. I love this feature and am missing it using Poweramp as I have quite some files with mixed artists.

[w3wilkes]

10 hours ago, Sascha Kiss said:

FooBar has an option to parse multiple artists and album artists separated by semicolon. An artist such as „Me; You“ would appear under „Me“ and „You“ rather than under „Me; You“. I love this feature and am missing it using Poweramp as I have quite some files with mixed artists.

Logitech Media Server also works this way and I also miss it in Poweramp.

[Sascha Kiss]

16 minutes ago, w3wilkes said:

Logitech Media Server also works this way and I also miss it in Poweramp.

Not to forget Kodi that also parses multiple artists.

[MadMaxster]

I came to this forum for this EXACT reason.

I'm using mediaMonkey as my music organizer and it also uses semicolon to separate artists on albumartists tag.

So if I have artists 'A;B;C' for albumartists tag, I would expect an album to be available under artist 'A' or 'B' or 'C' but instead it just groups under  "A/B/C' which relies on me remembering the artist name 'A' to find it again (by scrolling without using search)

Also if I have  another album with  'X;B;Z' for albumartists tag then I can't get both albums for 'B' to show up together, I have two entries 'A/B/C' & 'X/B/Z' but nothing under 'B' itself.

 

Add mediamonkey to the list (FooBar, Logitech Media Server as previously mentioned) which supports this parsing of albumartists this way also.

Poweramp is awesome and I use it every day! Please make this enhancement to make it 'awesome'er' 😊

Thanks!

[andrewilley]

This is a very often requested feature, and one which I would like to see myself, however I do see a few potential issues that would need to be discussed though.

In Poweramp, the Album Artist tag mentioned by @MadMaxster is used primarily as a token which must 100% match in order to define which tracks should be grouped together to form one album entity. It is considered as a grouping item - such as "Various Artists" or a single artist's or band's name - rather than a collection of individual Artist names which might vary track by track. If PA subdivides Album Artist down into smaller units, that might break its primary function of delineating individual albums.

For the Artist tag (along with Composer) it does make a lot more sense to use separators so you can see each contributing artist more easily - which would also have the bonus result of replacing that awful trendy phrase "feat." when describing duos.  There are some instances where you wouldn't want this occurring of course, such as composite band names like "Crosby, Stills & Nash" or "Siouxsie and the Banshees". But what about dual artists who often record together, such as "Simon & Garfunkel"? Should their duo songs be listed as being by both "Paul Simon" and "Art Garfunkel", or just shown as the combined entity? My suggestion for tagging such material would be to format the Artist tag as "Simon & Garfunkel ; Paul Simon ; Art Garfunkel" so you see the song under all three names in the Artists list.

Also, have people considered an issue that already occurs with the Genre tag? The number of songs shown in the Genre category is currently falsely increased when any songs appear under two or more Genre identifiers. Let's take a silly little example where you have just 40 songs in your entire library - 5 of them are "Pop",  10 are "Rock", and a further 25 are considered to be dual "Rock ; Pop". What you now see in the Genres category is just two entries, "Pop" and "Rock", with 30 songs in the "Pop" section and 35 as "Rock". So now you have a total of 65 songs showing in your Genre library category, although there are really only 40 songs in your collection. If you then started playback of your whole library by Genre, you would hear 65 songs played, 20 of which would have been played twice during the session. This issue is perhaps not so much of a problem with a fairly limited number of Genre options, but once you apply it to Artists too, with perhaps thousands of individual names, it could become more of a concern.

Andre

[Absinthequ]

5 hours ago, andrewilley said:

This is a very often requested feature, and one which I would like to see myself, however I do see a few potential issues that would need to be discussed though.

In Poweramp, the Album Artist tag mentioned by @MadMaxster is used primarily as a token which must 100% match in order to define which tracks should be grouped together to form one album entity. It is considered as a grouping item - such as "Various Artists" or a single artist's or band's name - rather than a collection of individual Artist names which might vary track by track. If PA subdivides Album Artist down into smaller units, that might break its primary function of delineating individual albums.

For the Artist tag (along with Composer) it does make a lot more sense to use separators so you can see each contributing artist more easily - which would also have the bonus result of replacing that awful trendy phrase "feat." when describing duos.  There are some instances where you wouldn't want this occurring of course, such as composite band names like "Crosby, Stills & Nash" or "Siouxsie and the Banshees". But what about dual artists who often record together, such as "Simon & Garfunkel"? Should their duo songs be listed as being by both "Paul Simon" and "Art Garfunkel", or just shown as the combined entity? My suggestion for tagging such material would be to format the Artist tag as "Simon & Garfunkel ; Paul Simon ; Art Garfunkel" so you see the song under all three names in the Artists list.

Also, have people considered an issue that already occurs with the Genre tag? The number of songs shown in the Genre category is currently falsely increased when any songs appear under two or more Genre identifiers. Let's take a silly little example where you have just 40 songs in your entire library - 5 of them are "Pop",  10 are "Rock", and a further 25 are considered to be dual "Rock ; Pop". What you now see in the Genres category is just two entries, "Pop" and "Rock", with 30 songs in the "Pop" section and 35 as "Rock". So now you have a total of 65 songs showing in your Genre library category, although there are really only 40 songs in your collection. If you then started playback of your whole library by Genre, you would hear 65 songs played, 20 of which would have been played twice during the session. This issue is perhaps not so much of a problem with a fairly limited number of Genre options, but once you apply it to Artists too, with perhaps thousands of individual names, it could become more of a concern.

Andre

I think with any library in the world, this is how Genre works. The glitch in the world of the library systems really started in the 90's with mp3 players being designed poorly and not being able to sort out multiple Genres in the library. I think we're really just back to normal now. But I see your analogy and maybe this needs to be a third category. Artists and Album Artists remain untouched and there is a new Multiple Artists category? I would actually prefer this and you either enable it or not. This seems like a win win for everyone.

I sketched this out on a piece of paper and I don't even think it is possible to work for Album Artists.

If you tagged a song as: Artist: Eminem, Album Artist: Eminem; Dr. Dre, Album: Encore then went to the Artists category -> Eminem. You would see two albums: Eminem - Encore and Dr. Dre - Encore (based on how Poweramp sorts these tags) and under Albums and Genre you would see the same thing, duplicate albums.

If you tagged a song as Artist: Eminem; Dr. Dre, Album Artist: Eminem, Album: Encore then went to the Artists category you would see one album under Eminem as: Eminem - Encore and one album under Dre. Dre as: Dr. Dre - Encore so then you need: "Album Artist Label for Albums / Tracks" selected in the options so would see it as: Eminem - Encore under Artists-> Dr. Dre.

Looking at it now, it seems like it doesn't really cause any conflicts if it is an optional Multiple Artists category and you only separate Artist tag...

I also agree with tagging as "Simon & Garfunkel ; Paul Simon ; Art Garfunkel" to see all 3. You can also do what I do currently and tag everything those two artists do as Artist: Simon & Garfunkel and change the Album Artist tag to "Simon & Garfunkel", "Paul Simon', and "Art Garfunkel" and enable in the settings "Album Artist Label for Albums / Tracks" That will group them together in Artists, but you'll still be able to see they are different projects and you still have the ability to see them individually in Album Artists category. 

[Zedniac]

To be honest, I don't see an issue with the "duplicate" songs between artists - mainly because even though the numbers may be initially confusing, I can't think of a time where having a song show up under multiple artists would be an issue. 

 

As far as album artists go, I'm not sure why Absinthequ assumes that the album would show up twice when navigating to Artists > Eminem > Encore. In MusicBee on desktop (one of the most capable players), that album would just show once when you navigate there, but under the album artist "Eminem; Dr. Dre".

 

Also, if some are interested in this feature and others are not, one solution may be to make the feature optional and turned off by default. So by default, the album Encore would show up under the album artist "Eminem; Dr. Dre", but with the feature enabled, would show up once under "Eminem" and once under "Dr. Dre".

[Absinthequ]

2 minutes ago, Zedniac said:

As far as album artists go, I'm not sure why Absinthequ assumes that the album would show up twice when navigating to Artists > Eminem > Encore. In MusicBee on desktop (one of the most capable players), that album would just show once when you navigate there, but under the album artist "Eminem; Dr. Dre".

Because we're talking about Poweramp splitting Artists and Album Artists based on the ;

Your scenario is only one of the two

[Zedniac]

@Absinthequ well my point is that the functionality remains the same whether it's Artist or Album Artist

[MadMaxster]

Thanks for the conversation and suggestions, but I'm not sure why this is so complicated.

For me it's boils down to just parsing for ';' in albumartist tag and adding to multiple artists instead of recognizing it as a unique string. This is just creating multiple pointers to the same object/file and allowing you to find it by different paths.

 

 

It's up to the user to get the tag itself correct and the tag content determines where the albums show up in the listing.

For Andre's genre example : 40 songs :5 pop, 10 rock, 25 'rock;pop', I expect  35 in Rock and 30 in pop exactly like you say. If I want to play Rock I do expect to get 35 files, if I want to play Pop I do expect to get 30 files, and the player should be smart enough that if you select all genre's to only add the file once (by default) (multiple pointers resolve to the same file so don't re-add),  so I get 40 songs.

(I find it useful to think about this with Venn diagrams, each song can only be a single element in the venn diagram, but you can draw different collections around objects to group them)

 

Artist and AlbumArtist are two unique tags and as far as I know completely separate relationship (e.g. I can put Artist:Kate Bush, AlbumArtist:Rage against the Machine if I so wish).

So for Absintheque's example :

Artist: Eminem, Album Artist: Eminem; Dr. Dre, Album: Encore

This should be broken  down to  simple single elements and handled with pointer to the same file under :

Artist: Eminem, Album Artist: Eminem, Album: Encore  AND

Artist: Eminem, Album Artist: Dr. Dre, Album: Encore

and likewise :

Artist: Eminem; Dr. Dre, Album Artist: Eminem, Album: Encore

should be broken down as :

Artist: Dr. Dre, Album Artist: Eminem, Album: Encore AND

Artist: Eminem, Album Artist: Eminem, Album: Encore

Having stuff show up in multiple places is fine by me. I control the tag content, but I need Poweramp to do the tag breakdown and simplification to multiple pointers.

This is what other programs do to handle this scenario.

 

Thx! glad this is getting some chatter at a minimum!

Again I love this product.

 

 

 

 

 

[Absinthequ]

Here is the problem: The standard for multiple artists tags is in the Artist tag. The majority of websites where you buy/download music tag this way with the ; already in place.

Poweramp sorts/groups all albums in all categories by the Album Artists field following the standard. In order for Album Artist to be the Multiple Artists splitter, Poweramp library sorting would have to be redesigned and everyone who uses Poweramp and downloads music would have to install Musicbee or one of the other backwards sorting apps and retag their library to match.

Both of those scenarios are just not likely. Why not use an app on Windows that tags the correct way and then the rest of the world doesn't have to redo their library?

[MadMaxster]

I didn't go through the sorting expected for the example breakdown.

Quote

 

So for Absintheque's example :

Artist: Eminem, Album Artist: Eminem; Dr. Dre, Album: Encore

This should be broken  down to  simple single elements and handled with pointer to the same file under :

Artist: Eminem, Album Artist: Eminem, Album: Encore  AND

Artist: Eminem, Album Artist: Dr. Dre, Album: Encore

 

So if I sort by :

Album I can access this file under : 1 single album - Encore

Artist I can access this file under : Eminem only

AlbumArtist I can access this file under : Eminem OR Dr. Dre

Quote

 

and likewise :

Artist: Eminem; Dr. Dre, Album Artist: Eminem, Album: Encore

should be broken down as :

Artist: Dr. Dre, Album Artist: Eminem, Album: Encore AND

Artist: Eminem, Album Artist: Eminem, Album: Encore

 

So if I sort by :

Album I can access this file under : 1 single album - Encore

Artist I can access this file under : Eminem OR Dr. Dre

AlbumArtist I can access this file under : Eminem

 

I find it's rarer to have mutliple AlbumArtists on Albums, compared to multiple Artists.

For this reason today I pretty much use list by AlbumArtists exclusively in Poweramp to ensure that albums are grouped together.

But multiple AlbumArtists are much more common on singles and Poweramp doesn't refactor them under individual artists right now.

[Absinthequ]

46 minutes ago, MadMaxster said:

So for Absintheque's example :

Artist: Eminem, Album Artist: Eminem; Dr. Dre, Album: Encore

This should be broken  down to  simple single elements and handled with pointer to the same file under :

Artist: Eminem, Album Artist: Eminem, Album: Encore  AND

Artist: Eminem, Album Artist: Dr. Dre, Album: Encore

Thx! glad this is getting some chatter at a minimum!

Again I love this product.

 

 

 

 

 

Problem is this would end up in two albums listed under Eminem with how Poweramps current sorting is. This would require a major redesign to sort this way. This is also tagged backwards from the standard. So people who don't custom tag wouldn't benefit from this at all.

[MadMaxster]

5 minutes ago, Absinthequ said:

Here is the problem: The standard for multiple artists tags is in the Artist tag. The majority of websites where you buy/download music tag this way with the ; already in place.

Poweramp sorts/groups all albums in all categories by the Album Artists field following the standard. In order for Album Artist to be the Multiple Artists splitter, Poweramp library sorting would have to be redesigned and everyone who uses Poweramp and downloads music would have to install Musicbee or one of the other backwards sorting apps and retag their library to match.

Both of those scenarios are just not likely. Why not use an app on Windows that tags the correct way and then the rest of the world doesn't have to redo their library?

No changes are required to tags, it's how Poweramp interprets them here is the question.

Just because it is the way it is now, doesn't mean it can't be better.

What I see today is if I have a library :

A;B

A;C

B

A;D

I see A/B, A/C, A/D, B as separate entries.

I should be able to go select A and see all files except B

I should be able to go select B  and see A;B  file and B file etc.

 

Are you really saying that seeing :

A/B, A/C, A/D, B 

is better or more correct than just seeing :

A, B, C, D

 

I do agree that this is probably  a sizable change to the  way Poweramp stores the database, but just because it's a large change doesn't make it not worth pursing (or incorrect) and be in line with the way other music programs handle this scenario.

[MadMaxster]

6 minutes ago, Absinthequ said:

Problem is this would end up in two albums listed under Eminem with how Poweramps current sorting is. This would require a major redesign to sort this way. This is also tagged backwards from the standard. So people who don't custom tag wouldn't benefit from this at all.

Agreed - this would need to be applied to all fields to work properly, not just AlbumArtist.

But if you could insert the flatten routine to create the multiple pointers all of  which have a single item per tag then the engine should just work as normal.

e.g. A;B gets interpreted as both A & B pointing to the same file.

Care would have to be taken for duplicate files in queues though.

[Absinthequ]

I'm not sure the juice is worth the squeeze. The goal is for Multiple Artists to work correctly and it's a simple implementation for Artist tag. I'm not sure making the App compatible with a third party Windows app is ever going to be a goal for the developer. You can always Emulate Poweramp and have it on Windows as well. 😤

[MadMaxster]

2 minutes ago, Absinthequ said:

I'm not sure the juice is worth the squeeze

I tend to agree with you that this is unlikely to happen unless there's a major overhaul scheduled.

Nevertheless I've been able to say my piece and stated my view on how it should be improved, so I'm thankful for this forum.

It's my number #1 gripe with Poweramp but still it's not big enough to make me switch to something else right now.

Still love it! Thanks for the constructive discussion!

[Absinthequ]

I would say this and genre listing albums instead of artists is the only two things holding this app from hands down the best app in every way. 

[andrewilley]

10 hours ago, Zedniac said:

To be honest, I don't see an issue with the "duplicate" songs between artists - mainly because even though the numbers may be initially confusing, I can't think of a time where having a song show up under multiple artists would be an issue. 

I agree that if this is implemented, the same song should appear under each of the relevant artists' names (such as the same song listed within Library>Artists>Eminem and also Library>Artists>Dr. Dre).

As noted above, this would incorrectly increase the 'total songs' count in the Artists view, in the same manner that already happens in the Genres category. Personally I don't have any particular issue with this apart from the fact that run-on playback might end up playing the same song multiple times during one session. Again, not especially an issue for me personally, but in the past there have been posts about the same songs supposedly repeating during one playback session (e.g. shuffled) so it might generate some spurious bug reports.

As for splitting Album Artist tags, I agree that having multiple names within an Album Artist tag is probably much rarer than for track artists, but the easiest way to handle it would be to only use the complete, unseparated, tag for album identification/grouping purposes, but allow the separated artists to be shown in category views.

Andre

[w3wilkes]

In my Logitech Media Server I have a library of over 24,000 tracks spread across over 1,700 albums and really don't pay attention to the counts of things. I have several albums that have multiple Album Artist tags and really don't have a problem with counts when viewing by album artist. If I go to Elton John and play everything under that artist I get all songs in Tumbleweed Connection, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Duets, Sleeping With the Past and Union and nothing gets repeated when I play. If I go to Album Artist Leon Russell and select to play everything I get Leon Russell and the Shelter People and Union and nothing gets repeated. I'm not seeing the issue. I guess the repeat problem would happen if I selected to play both all Elton John and Leon Russell the Union album would be repeated. Since I typically queue by albums or playlists this wouldn't be a problem for me. I would bet this is the case for all the programs that allow multiple Album Artist / Artist, but I have yet to see a question in their forums as to how an album got queued twice.

[fyourself]

On 9/26/2020 at 2:35 AM, andrewilley said:

 For the Artist tag (along with Composer) it does make a lot more sense to use separators so you can see each contributing artist more easily

+1

Delimiters in the composer tag would be appreciated.