Respect ARTISTS tag if present

[fnmain]

Hi! My music library is organized using MusicBrainz Picard, which means that the standard `artist` tag in my files contains the artist, plus any featured and appearing artists as well. Leading to this when I'm trying to find songs from an artist

What Picard does is with the standard `artist` tag that looks like this

It also includes a non-standard `ARTISTS` tag that looks like this

(On MP3, it's still called `ARTISTS`, but it's one tag with the artists separated by either null bytes, or some other delimeter depending on the ID3v2 version)

Of course, I could just use Poweramp's split artists system to remedy this,

but even then there are still edge cases

I'd love to see Poweramp derive how to split artists using the `ARTISTS` tag! Thanks in advance for your consideration 😁

[fnmain]

Also worth noting is that MusicBrainz Picard offers a solution to this issue as well

There are 2 ways to use the metadata that Picard provides to solve this issue. The first way uses MBIDs instead of artist names to group artists together, and the second way is to use the `Sort Artist` tag with the rest of the tags I've described to derive how artists should be grouped.

# Way number 1

This solution uses the artist MBIDs that MusicBrainz provides to group artists together. Simply take the `ARTISTS` tag

And apply it to the MusicBrainz Artist IDs tag(s)

The Artist MBIDs tag(s) will always be in the same order as the `ARTISTS` tag(s). And will always be the same for every possible spelling of a given artist.

This way is probably the best way to do this, but requires that your music be tagged with a MusicBrainz compatible tagger.

# Way number 2

Though it wouldn't be very easy to implement. This solution uses the `ARTISTS` tag described above, as well as the standard `artist` tag, and a new `Sort Artist` tag.

Consider the following tags

The solution here is to use the `ARTISTS` tag to derive what the join phrases are for the given `artist` tag

Then apply that to the `Sort Artist` tag

Picard will always make the `Sort Artist` tag match what is stored in the MusicBrainz database. For example, the `Sort Artist` tags for each one of these separate artists

Would be the same across all of them

This method uses mostly standard tags, but leaves open a few edge cases

Edited February 19 by fnmain

[andrewilley]

Generally, Poweramp supports a subset of the dozens of tags already defined in the official specs. And neither ID3 nor Vorbis define an 'Artists' tag as far as I'm aware. It's not really possible to support every extra tagging variant invented by various third-party apps for their own use.

PA does support multiple artists though - either via separator symbols within tags, or using multiple instances of Vorbis ARTIST tags - and it can also display the full unsplit strings too, if the user selects that option.

Supporting the isolated tags for ARTISTSORT, ALBUMSORT, TITLESORT, etc is something that has been suggested in the past, but it's not on the to-do list for adding any time soon as far as I know.

Andre