Sorting for Multiple Artists

[simbun]

If future-proofing still is important to you, I think you should avoid the non-standard ARTISTS, since that concept requires a single-value ARTIST. I also think you should avoid tagging ARTIST in a non-standard way (like "INXS feat. Ray Charles" or "INXS, Ray Charles"). If you aim for future-proofing & compatibility, the ARTIST field should hold all artists in the standard way, ie with multiple ARTIST fields. (The exception is crappy car- and portable players, which often don't support multiple artists at all. Then you're forced to populate ARTIST with all the artists in a single string.)

I absolutely agree, and have gone to some lengths to let the OP know that it's not the most compatible approach. Nethertheless, it is supported by the big two music servers (Emby & Jellyfin), a number of OpenSubsonic servers and one of the best UPnP servers, so most of the bases are covered.

Personally, I don't wanna mess too much with my tags in the future, so I try to follow the standards for the most basic tags. I definitely wouldn't want to change the concept of my ARTIST fields. Besides you don't know today which players you'll be using tomorrow.

The approach I use, which isn't the Picard default, is to store the artist collaboration (Artist) and both multivalue tags (Artists and Artistsort), so if there ever was a need to revert back to the more traditional setup it would be a relatively painless task - though it would require a full backup.

I think it's a better solution than ARTISTS, but neither is widely supported.

I agree that a better solution would have been to use a non-standard tag for the collaboration, but does any server/player other than MusicBee support DISPLAY ARTIST?

[simbun]

I might have to keep it simple (such as using "INXS" as the Artist and ArtistSort for that one song instead of trying to add the featuring artist) for most of these scenarios. Then I could use something like Picard to add detailed tags in the future?

How does dbpoweramp tag them? I assume as follows:

Artist: INXS; Ray Charles
ArtistSort: INXS; Charles, Ray

If that's the case I'd leave them like that. If you wanted to go down the route of "feat/&" leave that to Picard.

I am also wondering 2 additional questions:

How would you (or most people) handle Purple Rain by Prince? To me, the artist is technically Prince and the Revolution. I will use AlbumArtist as Prince so it goes in the same main artist folder as his other albums. But I noticed that both Spotify and SiriusXM have songs from that album show Prince as the artist (no reference to the Revolution). And does anyone tag this as a Soundtrack (if it is possible to tag soundtracks as soundtracks)?

MusicBrainz attributes the album to:

Albumartist: Prince; The Revolution

releasetype is used to tag it as a Soundtrack (top right of MusicBrainz page).

How do you (or most people) handle CD Singles? Do you add "(CD Single)" to the Album title at the end? Most CD Singles have several songs or remixes, not to mention the song is usually on one or more albums. Example:
INXS - X (Bitter Tears is a track on that album)
INXS - Greatest Hits (Bitter Tears is a track on that album)
INXS - Bitter Tears (CD single with that song plus remixes).

So, would you just call the CD single "Bitter Tears" or "Bitter Tears (CD Single)" or something else?

Use the official release title (Bitter Tears) and tag it with a releasetype of Single.

[garym]

How would you (or most people) handle Purple Rain by Prince? To me, the artist is technically Prince and the Revolution. I will use AlbumArtist as Prince so it goes in the same main artist folder as his other albums. But I noticed that both Spotify and SiriusXM have songs from that album show Prince as the artist (no reference to the Revolution). And does anyone tag this as a Soundtrack (if it is possible to tag soundtracks as soundtracks)

I would use:

ARTIST: Prince and the Revolution
ALBUMARTIST: Prince

I haven't used RELEASETYPE. If starting over I likely would use this tag. If I was going to tag this as a soundtrack, that would be a GENRE tag for me. I use "Pop/Rock" for the genre for that album personally. I started off with a hundred or more genres but later on simplified considerably:

Pop/Rock
Jazz
Country
Bluegrass
Latin
Reggae
Hip Hop
World
Classical
Opera
Soundtrack
Comedy
Spoken Word

p.s. I too would avoid ARTISTS or DISPLAY ARTIST as tag fields. I use Lyron Music Server (LMS), Roon Labs, foobar2000. None of these handle these tags as standards (although all 3 can handle lot of custom tags).

And if you are serious about classical, then there are tag fields that people find very useful (WORK, MOVEMENT, etc.). I don't bother, but I have only 63 classical albums out of 8,779 total albums.

[vilsen]

How would you (or most people) handle Purple Rain by Prince?

I do this:

ALBUM=Purple Rain
ALBUM ARTIST=Prince
ARTIST=Prince

So no "Revolution" since I want to bring together his albums under "Prince" when browsing.

But here's where DISPLAY ARTIST would be great if it was supported by my players!

DISPLAY ARTIST=Prince and the Revolution

[vilsen]

does any server/player other than MusicBee support DISPLAY ARTIST?

I haven't found proper documentation of DISPLAY ARTIST support other than for MusicBee. But I found these interesting links:

https://opensubsonic.netlify.app/docs/responses/child/ DISPLAYARTIST & DISPLAYALBUMARTIST is mentioned

https://opensubsonic.netlify.app/docs/ Symfonium & Lightweight Music Server is mentioned (among others apps)


I don't use Symfonium, but it's my impression that you can set your preferred "Display Artist" based on e.g. ARTIST or ALBUMARTIST etc in the settings, i.e. without any DISPLAYARTIST tag. Is this correct?

And the second link above implies to me that Symfonium even supports the tag DISPLAYARTIST - but I could be wrong. I'm not sure what OpenSubsonic is all about.

[simbun]

So three responses and three different answers :-)

I don't use Symfonium, but it's my impression that you can set your preferred "Display Artist" based on e.g. ARTIST or ALBUMARTIST etc in the settings, i.e. without any DISPLAYARTIST tag. Is this correct?

"displayArtist" is the name of a field in the API containing the full set of album/track artists (depending on the endpoint being called) as a single string. If your files don't contain the full collaboration ("Artist1 feat. Artist2") the server will generate a concatenation from the multivalue tag. I don't believe there is such a thing as a DISPLAY ARTIST tag.

I'm not sure what OpenSubsonic is all about.

OpenSubsonic is an open API that allows communication between compatible servers and clients. I've been using Lightweight Music Server with Symfonium for about 15 months and it delivers nearly (there's always something) everything I could want. If you're on Android and can handle a docker install then you really should try it.

[garym]

I do this:

ALBUM=Purple Rain
ALBUM ARTIST=Prince
ARTIST=Prince

So no "Revolution" since I want to bring together his albums under "Prince" when browsing.

But here's where DISPLAY ARTIST would be great if it was supported by my players!

DISPLAY ARTIST=Prince and the Revolution

My main system (lyrion music server) with ARTIST = Prince and the Revolution and ALBUMARTIST = Prince would show:

When browsing the album would show up under Prince. When playing, the now playing screen would show: Prince and the Revolution.

[vilsen]

Yes if browsing for ALBUMARTIST. No if browsing for ARTIST, then if you would have all of Prince's albums, they would be split up to "Prince", "Prince and the Revolution", "Prince & The New Power Generation" etc.

I don't want that. It's only on the "now playing screen" I want to see the full band name.

[vilsen]

"displayArtist" is the name of a field in the API containing the full set of album/track artists (depending on the endpoint being called) as a single string. If your files don't contain the full collaboration ("Artist1 feat. Artist2") the server will generate a concatenation from the multivalue tag. I don't believe there is such a thing as a DISPLAY ARTIST tag.

Yes that's roughly what I thought the Symfonium setting would do. Seeing that the API already supports a displayArtist field/feature, it would seem a no brainer for Symfonium to support the DISPLAYARTIST tag since it's a simpler approach and implementation. It doesn't seem a long stretch for them to support it - perhaps you being a "power user" could make a request? If we could get the tag standardised it would greatly simplify tagging & setups for many of us, without breaking anything.