[feature request] Merge Artists

[Boutros]

Hi Hakko -

I went ahead and took the plunge yesterday and installed the MusicCabinet add-on (I'd PM'ed you beforehand). Very cool stuff.

I'm sure there will be other things that will occur to me as I keep playing with it, but here's one thing that immediately leaps out at me.

Would it be possible to get a "merge" feature for Artists, similar to what you have now for Genres? The case I'm running into is that I'll have what I know to be a single artist that due to (I guess?) inconsistent Last.Fm tagging gets scattered across multiple different artist entries, and it just looks like a mess. I'd love to be able to, similar to the Genre-merge feature specify that (to use a real example from my library),

Bonnie "Prince" Billy
Bonnie "Prince" Billy & The Cairo Gang
Bonnie "Prince" Billy/Matthew Sweeney
Bonnie 'Prince" Billy & The Cairo Gang
Bonnie 'Prince' Billy
Bonnie 'Prince' Billy & The Black Swans
Bonnie Prince Billy & Brightblack
Bonnie Prince Billy/Matt Sweeney
Bonny Billy
Bonny Billy & The Picket Line
Bonny Billy and Marquis de Tren
Bonny Billy and Marquis de Tren featuring the Monkey Boys

...are all the same person, and have them show up once in the artist list, under Bonnie 'Prince' Billy. Right now, it takes a lot of hunting and pecking to find the album I'm looking for when I have to first guess which version of the artist name that album is under (certainly I could do it via search, but I enjoy seeing "all my Bonnie 'Prince' Billy records" in one place, and then picking amongst them, to continue that example).

Similarly, maybe there could be an option to EXCLUDE artists from the Artist pane (similar to how you can suppress certain Genres from showing up in the Genre cloud. I have a ton of compilation albums, with really obscure African musicians who maybe only have one song in my entire 100k+ song library. It's a bit annoying to have them show up, equally weighted, in the "Artist" list alongside someone like Fela Kuti, who I have 27 separate albums for.

I guess this is the behavior I mentioned in my PM, and why I personally prefer the file-based browsing in SS 4.6 - I've spent hundreds of hours meticulously tagging and organizing my collection, so having it all get scattered like this is a bit tough to take.

That said, I really love a lot of the functionality here, and am really impressed with this - can't wait to see what you come up with next!

All the best,

- Boutros

[hakko]

I'd suggest you use the "Album Artist" tag. Especially for hip-hop albums where every other song has an artist such as X feat Y, X feat Z etc, I still want that album shown as X in the left frame. What I then do is use X as "Album Artist" for all songs, but X, X feat Y, X feat Z etc as Artist. Then, the album as a whole gets grouped as X in the left frame, but X feat Y is displayed in the main window.

[hakko]

For Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, Bonny Billy etc, I'm against having a Merge functionality as I believe this should rather be fixed in your tags. Different artist names represent different artists. If the difference is a spelling error, then it should be fixed in the tags. Having bad tags has side effects as not getting biographies from last.fm, not finding similar artists etc (even though last.fm has some spelling corrections on their side).

[Boutros]

Huh... that's very strange. I use Tag & Rename to clean up and normalize my tags for every album before it ever gets dropped into my Subsonic directory, and I have all of his albums tagged as Bonnie 'Prince' Billy on albums where he's the sole artist listed, and Bonnie 'Prince' Billy & xxxxxxxxx in cases where there's a backing band specified - never Bonnie "Prince", never Bonny, etc., so I thought those variations were coming back from Last.fm.

I just did a quick run through all of those individual artist entries and, using the "Tag editor" feature in SS confirmed that they're all tagged consistently and spelled correctly.

Is it possible it's an ID3v1 vs ID3v2 issue? If so, or if it's going to require re-tagging for Album Artist versus Artist, then... I give up, as I don't have the energy or inclination to re-tag 100k+ tracks all over again. I've literally wasted weeks of my life getting them into the format they are now

[hakko]

All the names in the left frame are artists taken from the tags in your library. Only artists who appear as main artist on an album are displayed, not artists who only has a track on a compilation album (= where the Album Artist tag is used). Nothing displayed in the artist list comes from last.fm.

When scanning your library, album artist and artist tags are read. IDv2 takes precedence over ID3v1. But it's quite unlikely that you have bad ID3v2 tags and good ID3v1 tags... right?
Some software write bad tags to your files or invent their own tags. ID3 specs are in general poorly written and therefore not widely followed.

The tag editor in Subsonic doesn't display album artist, something I should look into (again).

Judging from the output you posted, there seems to be a big variation of how your tags are written. My only recommendation is to go through your files - I guess you would be interested in knowing why some of them are tagged as Bonny Billy?

I use Beets to fix the tags of all my music before adding it to my collection. It's very automated and works well. http://beets.radbox.org/

[Boutros]

OK, I guess I'll have to look into this further when I get home to the machine where my files are.

My only guess is that these had pre-existing tags in the "Album Artist" field that are conflicting with what I set via Tag & Rename in the Artist field.

When I'm adding a new album by an Artist that I already have other albums for, part of my workflow is to confirm what naming convention I'm using for that artist, so I'm 100% certain that the tags I have are correct - I re-tag every album that makes it into my archive by hand. I'm incredibly OCD about this, and I've never had any problems. However, I guess Tag&Rename manipulates the Artist tag, not the Album Artist tag (unless you dig 2 or 3 tabs deep to find it), so it seems totally possible that these already had different Album Artist tags without my knowledge. That would explain why everything is consistent in T&R, in Subsonic, and when I view the files, but radically different in MusicCabinet when looking at the Album Artist tag. Ugh...

I'll take a look at Beets and see if this would help to speed up the process of re-re-tagging all of these files enough to make the project worthwhile.

Thanks for the insight,

- MOB

[hakko]

I hope it can be automated! That's what I like about Beets - it looks up CDs from MusicBrainz and fixes all tags, including Album Artist, without much involvement from me (unless the original tags are horribly bad). So I don't manually have to verify issues like 'Prince' vs "Prince", Beets does that for me.

I guess it's also a matter of where your music comes from. Some sources are more reliable than others...

I'm super OCD about my collection too and I believe the Album Artist tag adds a lot of value, as it makes it possible to group multiple songs, but still keep individual artist tags. How do you handle split albums otherwise, for example? (where the first half of the album is made by one artist, and the other by another artist)

[hakko]

I just posted this, it's basically the same thing again, but written as one post for future reference: viewtopic.php?f=11&t=10454

[alexgriffis]

Hi Boutros,
Those album artist tags are definitely ignored by some tagging software, and one run through with Beets will help you 'merge' your artists. Setting the album artist tags on your compilation albums with 'Various Artists' will get you one step further, I recommend Mp3tag for this purpose.

Since your library has many obscure artists and compilations, you might not get the results you're hoping for from Beets and other MusicBrainz based software. Instead you can use Mp3tag which will give you full control over your collection and tags.

You mentioned that your artist tags are correct already. I set up a Mp3tag action to copy my 'artist' tag to the 'album artist' tag. I then ran it on all my music which had single artist albums, then refreshed my library using MusicCabinet, problem solved.