Displaying featured artists as "feat. [Name]"

[Spymaster]

If your tracks contained the musicbrainz_releasetrackid tag, or even musicbrainz_albumid, I could possibly produce a Mp3tag update script to add the artist tags to your collection, but that wouldn't help on the Asset front.

I had a very quick look at MediaMonkey and it doesn't appear to support many of the MusicBrainz tags; out of interest, how did you get 'Artist1 feat. Artist2' into your tags as it seems to only support the more traditional 'Artist1; Artist2'?

I don't use musicbrainz at all really, other than as lookups while using dbpoweramp.

I enter "Artist1 feat. Artist2", literally in that format, into either the "Album Artist" or "Artist" field, upload it to my NAS, and Asset splits it easily into two separate artists for its database.

[Spymaster]

Wouldn't the easiest solution be for Asset to present its database for searching and then present the "Artist" field for accurate display? Wouldn't that be the best of both words, be mega easy and require no effort at the user's end?

[simbun]

Wouldn't the easiest solution be for Asset to present its database for searching and then present the "Artist" field for accurate display? Wouldn't that be the best of both words, be mega easy and require no effort at the user's end?

Not sure what you mean. Could you provide an example using an artist tag containing 3 artists?

[Spymaster]

Not sure what you mean. Could you provide an example using an artist tag containing 3 artists?

Sure, so the artist could be tagged as "Robbie Williams feat. Kylie Minogue; Tom Jones".

Asset would take that away and store each artist separately in its database as "Robbie Williams", "Kylie Minogue", "Tom Jones".

If you played the track now, based on what Asset sends back, it would display the artist as "Robbie Williams; Kylie Minogue; Tom Jones".

But if Asset pulled back the artist string attached to the file, rather than the artists as held in the database, it would display "Robbie Williams feat. Kylie Minogue; Tom Jones"

Similar to what Streammagic appears to be doing of its own accord.

[vilsen]

I think what you're asking can be accomplished in Asset already, without touching your existing ARTIST tags. You could use DISPLAYARTIST (used by MusicBee) and a pseudo tag (e.g. ARTIZT) like this:

1. Add DISPLAYARTIST to the tracks that need the "feat." treatment, like this:

ARTIST=Peter Gabriel
ARTIST=Kate Bush
DISPLAYARTIST=Peter Gabriel feat. Kate Bush

2. Add the pseudo tag "artizt" to the index list in Asset. Don't tag your tracks with this pseudo tag, because it will be indexed based on ARTIST (see below).

3. In the rename list, add this:

preformat:=artizt:=%artist%
display:=Artizt:=Artist
preformat:=artist:=[IFVALUE]displayartist,[tag]displayartist[],[multitag]artist[][]

4. When configuring the browse tree, use "Artizt" instead of "Artist". You will still see "Artist" when you browse (because of the rename list).

This will make "Peter Gabriel feat. Kate Bush" display whilst playing, but you'll still able to browse both artists separately.

[simbun]

2. Add the pseudo tag "artizt" to the index list in Asset. Don't tag your tracks with this pseudo tag, because it will be indexed based on ARTIST (see below).

I had considered something like this but doesn't it break search i.e. the results will be a listing of the collaborations, not the unique artist names?

[Spymaster]

I think what you're asking can be accomplished in Asset already, without touching your existing ARTIST tags. You could use DISPLAYARTIST (used by MusicBee) and a pseudo tag (e.g. ARTIZT) like this:

1. Add DISPLAYARTIST to the tracks that need the "feat." treatment, like this:

ARTIST=Peter Gabriel
ARTIST=Kate Bush
DISPLAYARTIST=Peter Gabriel feat. Kate Bush

2. Add the pseudo tag "artizt" to the index list in Asset. Don't tag your tracks with this pseudo tag, because it will be indexed based on ARTIST (see below).

3. In the rename list, add this:

preformat:=artizt:=%artist%
display:=Artizt:=Artist
preformat:=artist:=[IFVALUE]displayartist,[tag]displayartist[],[multitag]artist[][]

4. When configuring the browse tree, use "Artizt" instead of "Artist". You will still see "Artist" when you browse (because of the rename list).

This will make "Peter Gabriel feat. Kate Bush" display whilst playing, but you'll still able to browse both artists separately.

But that would still require a massive amount of retagging at the user's end. Every single track with a featured artist would need to be changed. That's thousands of tracks in my case.

Isn't it possible for Asset to simply read the artist from the file itself for display purposes? That data is right there already.