Subsonic Forum

Hello,

Is it possible to display Artist Field for compilation instead of Album Artist? "Album Artist" Field often contains "Various Artists" like in Itunes library.

Only one change to do in getRawMetaData of net.sourceforge.subsonic.service.metadata.JaudiotaggerParser class, replace :

Code: Select all

String songArtist = getTagField(tag, FieldKey.ARTIST);
String albumArtist = getTagField(tag, FieldKey.ALBUM_ARTIST);
metaData.setArtist(StringUtils.isBlank(albumArtist) ? songArtist : albumArtist);

by :

Code: Select all

Boolean isCompilation = getTagField(tag, FieldKey.ARTIST).compareTo("1");
String songArtist = getTagField(tag, FieldKey.ARTIST);
String albumArtist = getTagField(tag, FieldKey.ALBUM_ARTIST);
if(isCompilation)
metaData.setArtist(StringUtils.isBlank(songArtist) ? albumArtist : songArtist);
else
metaData.setArtist(StringUtils.isBlank(albumArtist) ? songArtist : albumArtist);

Optionally, why did you overwrite Artist (or Album Artist) in setMetaData of the same class?

Yes -- this is a great idea!

Here's my use case. I have a lot of "tribute" albums where a number of artists cover the songs of a different artist that they're paying tribute to. I set the "Artist" field on each track to the name of the artist covering the song, and plug in the name of the artist being paid tribute to in the "Album Artist" field. Using the 4.7 rules, tribute albums tagged this way display the name of the "Album Artist" (the artist being paid tribute to) rather than the "Artist" (the artist actually performing the song) when browsing, searching, or playing tracks.

This suggestion would give us the ability to fix the "Album Artist"/"Artist" issue for our collections just by making sure that the "Compilation" tag is properly set. It would not require a new setting to enable/disable this behavior to be coded in Subsonic, and it would also give me the proper incentive to make sure my library is correctly tagged.

Excellent suggestion.

Different tagging softwares and file types handle the TPE2 field differently. Most of us probably don't use it for the original intended use for BAND/ORCHESTRA. A common use is to use it for the ALBUM ARTIST in a compilation which seems to be the intent in Subsonic 4.7. That is fine but it makes no sense to me to extend that to translating TPE2 into the TRACK ARTIST. That undermines the primary artist field, on which there is no disagreement whatsoever.

The original system of treating a folder as an album was fine by me. But if tags have to be used in defining an "ALBUM", it would seem the best practice to handle TPE2 tags would be to leave the choice up to the user:
1) Choice to treat it as ALBUM ARTIST or BAND/ORCHESTRA
2) If TPE2 is blank and all tracks in one folder share the album name and artist, then ALBUM ARTIST = ARTIST
3) If TPE2 is blank and all tracks in one folder with the same album name don't have the same artist, then ALBUM ARTIST = Various Artists (or whatever the user chooses)

Just signed up to add my support for this. All my compilations and soundtracks have VA shown instead of the track artist. It screws up search and scrobbling At the least it cculd be a toggle in settings for people who really want it to behave differently.

workarounds until Sindre has fixed it: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=10236&start=15#p46008

Thanks for the post hakko a few options there. This is definitely not good, given the music I listen too I've lots and lots of compilations with "ALBUM_ARTIST" set to 'Various' as discussed.

I would also like to cast my vote to request showing "Artist" tag instead of "Album Artist." As another poster mentioned, this not only hides the artist name on compilations, it also prevents the track from scrobbling to last.fm. A minor quibble I suppose, but for anyone as anal as I am about tracking my plays on last.fm it is quite irritating!

Add another to the list that wants this changed. I haven't messed with doing a workaround as yet, but had fallen back to 4.6 after discovering this in 4.7 a while back.

I really wish this would have been fixed by now. I've been patiently waiting since last year. All of my VA releases have "Various" in the Album Artist field. That field is great for grouping albums in media players like foobar, but a complete step backward in this instance. I'm tired of waiting and at the point where I'm going the mod route or downgrading to 4.6. Is it possible do downgrade without having to reset all my users?

yea same here. thinking of downgrading, sucks...

At least the search should be able to find artists based on all possible artist fields. I have some tracks by artists on their own albums and on compilations and the latter are not found with a query on their name.

And I would agree it makes sense for compilation albums to list the individual track artists in the interfase.

This really should be improved.

Yes, I also would really like this fixed. If you listen to a lot of electronic music, you have many compilations where the 'album artist' is a DJ while the tracks are produced independently. This feature in subsonic of defaulting to the album artist on *all* the tracks basically makes it unusable in this context. It makes correct last.fm scrobbles an impossibility, ruins search, and improperly displays metadata.

Is this planned on getting fixed, or is it a permanent feature? If it's staying, it would be nice to know, so we can make a decision on whether or not to move to something else.

I've "fixed" this without any recompiling of subsonic but it's basically retagging your library.

See http://forum.subsonic.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=10284#p56586 for the details

It only requires that you are using Musicbrainz Picard for tagging

Yeah, I'd still rather this get fixed on Subsonic's end than for me to have to do some sort of crazy manipulation on my end. Considering it's been 10 months since the original post though, I'm not holding my breath. Really wish this would get addressed through, I hate not being able to scrobble any of the thousands of compilation tracks I own.

I'd retag my perfectly tagged music collection to work around a subsonic bug over my cold, dead body.

I've moved to using Ampache until this gets fixed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampache