Jump to content

MKA Artist Album Level Tag


thomascheney

Recommended Posts

Poweramp doesn't recognize Artists that are specified at the 50 TargeTypeLevel (Album). Essentially Matroska says that you can specify the artist for the whole album and it should apply to all tracks here. If the artist is specified at a lower level (e.g. the 30 track level), you probably want to supersede the upper level, e.g.

 

if Artist30Level exists
	artist = Artist30Level
else
	artist = Aritist50Level

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Poweramp does not use the contents of any "Album Artist" tags as a fall-back should there be no "Artist" information available, it treats the song as if it has no Artist data (which technically it does not).

I'm guessing this design philosophy has been carried over to MKA files too, even though I agree that the MKA tag spec does say "if a CD has the same artist for all tracks, you just need to set the ARTIST tag at level 50 (ALBUM) and not to each TRACK (but you can)". Perhaps in a future build, Max might allow for a general situation where an ALBUM ARTIST tag exists, but no individual ARTIST tags?

Andre

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks for taking a look at this.

I wouldn't think that would be necessary. Somewhere you must be parsing the XML that contains the tags in the mka. Whatever code is grabbing the artist tag just needs to look at the 50 level if there is nothing at the 30 level, which should be really easy because it's all there in the same xml. It shouldn't need to be considered the album artist in that situation, just the track artist tag's specific location. The problem with not doing that is that you will have mka files that are correctly tagged according to Matroska that Poweramp does not read correctly.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

MKA's handling of the 'Album Artist' concept does appear to be its '50 level' Artist tag, so that should definitely be used as Album Artist if it is found.

However the MKA tagging spec does say that if the '30 level' version is not present, but 50 is, then the Album Artist data should also be parsed to fill the Artist field too, which PA does not currently do.

Of course that does preclude the (admittedly rare) situation where you genuinely have a track on a known album for which you do not know the track artist details. So I do think that the spec is actually wrong, and both variants should always be included in the tag data for completeness anyway (after all, what's another 60 bytes or so in the context of the size of an audio file?).

Andre

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...