Merge "Album Artist" and "Artist" views

[Wasabi Ice Cream]

This is something that I can't figure out how to pull off in Poweramp, but many other players support this.

Basically, one single Artist view, that lists Album Artist if it exists, and falls back to Artist tag if the other tag is empty.

[andrewilley]

Unfortunately that's not possible at the moment. The Artists view lists regular track artists, while the Album Artist view lists, literally as expected, album artists. Having an option for any empty Album Artist tags to trigger a fall back to using the Track Artist tag is something which gets requested from time to time, but hasn't yet made it into the app I'm afraid.

Of course the best and neatest solution is to tidy up the tagging of your music collection, but that could well be a rather long task. Even with a decent computer-based batch tag editor it took me many hours when I did mine, because I checked each one rather than just allowing an automated copy process to fill all empty Album Artist tags with the Artist value.

Andre

[MotleyG]

3 hours ago, Wasabi Ice Cream said:

This is something that I can't figure out how to pull off in Poweramp, but many other players support this.

Basically, one single Artist view, that lists Album Artist if it exists, and falls back to Artist tag if the other tag is empty.

I'm not sure how many other player apps actually do this. In fact many still do not even support the AlbumArtist tag at all. But for the most part, using the Artist list will do what you are suggesting already, showing all artists. The AlbumArtist list is generally much shorter as it does not show individual track artists from collections or the "Various Artists" moniker. As suggested by @andrewilley the best solution is to ensure your tags are completed - and much easier to manage on a computer than a mobile device.

[andrewilley]

I too find the Album Artist list of rather limited use, apart from as a grouping control to make sure tracks end up in the right album. To start with there are a load of things tucked away under "Various Artists". If find the Artists list, used in conjunction with the new Split Artist option to separate out duets/etc, much more useful.

Andre

[MotleyG]

I use the AlbumArtist list more often, as it allows drilling down into Albums much faster than going through the full Album list. But the Artist list is the full comprehensive list of all library Artists.

[andrewilley]

I use Folders for quick drill-down (my folder structure is fairly neatly Music/Artist/Album/songs.mp3) or Artists for artists by individual (split) names. But everyone has their own choices.

Andre

[6b6561]

I think the fallback would help a lot of people, I where also asking for this a long time ago, but I'm happy that I took the time and fixed my tags in the same way as Andre. It takes time to do it but see it as a one-time investment. Luckily I had my music organized in a neat hierarchy and used Folder view for years.

Nowadays I'm basically only using AlbumArtist as I normally listen to albums or search if I'm looking for some particular track.

Personally I'm glad that there isn't such an fallback as that forced me to fix my tags and that has been a good thing as my library is now clean and has worked without issues on any tested player on iOS, Android, Windows, UPNP...

[Wasabi Ice Cream]

Roger that. Working on fixing my tags now, then.