Play all songs by an Artist?

[ecd1973]

So this seems like a simple question, especially for someone who has used Subsonic as long as I have, but I just realized today that I can't search for an Artist and play all songs by that Artist.

1. Search for artist XYZ
2. All songs with that artist in the "Album Artist" tag come up (I'm using the web interface in this example).
3. Play all will then play all songs with that artist set as "Album Artist"
4. Any song on a soundtrack where "Album Artist" is Various, but "Artist" is XYZ are ignored.

So how do I play all songs by XYZ? Is there any way to do that?

[toolman]

To put it simple. You can't.
I too have albums from artists who also appear on compilation albums.
If I search for the arist I only get to see the albums where the artist is also the albumartist.
If I search for the song of the artist, the songs on the compilation albums come up, but the artist is "Various Artists".
So it seems that Subsonic only uses the Albumartist tag to search.

[ecd1973]

To put it simple. You can't.
I too have albums from artists who also appear on compilation albums.
If I search for the arist I only get to see the albums where the artist is also the albumartist.
If I search for the song of the artist, the songs on the compilation albums come up, but the artist is "Various Artists".
So it seems that Subsonic only uses the Albumartist tag to search.

I can't believe I never noticed that before. It would be helpful if search combined Artist and Album Artist in the results.

[toolman]

Yeah, I find it annoying as well.
It seems to me that it would be more logical to search the Artist tag in stead of the Albumartist tag.
It's also annoying that there's no "Advanced Search" option where you can define more strict queries.
I could use some external program to search my collection, but that's kind of ridiculous.
The search feature is advertised as "Free-text search helps you find your favorite tracks quickly".
But that's not quite true.