Subsonic Forum

I have an album with the artist tag set to "Hans Zimmer; James Newton Howard" and MusicCabinet correctly reads the split tag and it displays in my artist list as "Hans Zimmer / James Newton Howard." Would it be possible for MusicCabinet to treat it as both an album for Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard so it shows up on both their artist pages instead of creating a new artist page? Or keep the Hans Zimmer / James Newton Howard artist page but also show up both their artist pages as well?

Thanks again for this project and keep up the good work!

I think it is slightly ugly deciding that ";" is a special character (what if an artist has a real name containing ";")? But on the other hand, it's ugly having them appear as separate artists too. I've been going a bit back and forth on this but I think I'll decide it is a good idea to group such artists into both artist pages.

Would it be possible to apply this to featured artist too? So, A ft. B would show up under both artist A and artist B?

I'll have a look when I get home. Feature artists are even uglier as people use "ft.", "feat", "features X and Y", "feat X, Y" so I doubt it that it's possible to catch all. Life would be easier if tags where more semantically correct and people bothered to use them.

Thanks for considering my request hakko.

I should have been more clear, I don't think ; is the delimiter for multivalue fields. I think it is the NULL character. Foobar just uses ;[space] to symbolize it I believe. Either way, it's not as a terrible of a solution as ID3 v2.3, which used the / character as the delimiter and promptly caused all software to break spec so AC/DC would not be split xD.

FLAC:
I just tried adding multiple ARTIST tags via Mp3tag (Extended Tags) to a FLAC album, which is shown as "Hans Zimmer\\Blake Neely\\Geoff Zanelly" in the Mp3Tag Artist field.
Foobar correctly shows "Hans Zimmer, Blake Neely, Geoff Zanelly" in the playlist and "Hans Zimmer; Blake Neely; Geoff Zanelly" in the tag properties.

MC only reads the first artist, which is Hans Zimmer .

This is the right way of tagging Ogg Vorbis (FLAC uses vorbis tags) files, according to http://www.xiph.org/vorbis/doc/v-comment.html

Field names are not required to be unique (occur once) within a comment header. As an example, assume a track was recorded by three well know artists; the following is permissible, and encouraged:
ARTIST=Dizzy Gillespie
ARTIST=Sonny Rollins
ARTIST=Sonny Stitt

MP3:
It's not that easy, since MP3 doesn't support multiple artist tags.
ID3v2.4 uses null (\0) as delimiter, older versions used the '/' delimiter.

summary: foobar uses ';<space>', Mp3tag uses '\\' to symbolize multiple artists, the implementation depends on the file format.

Thanks for the summary maxxh! I wish I had thought this through when I designed the database originally. There are a few things I've learned over the last year that would motivate a slight re-design (indexes on expressions being one of them).