Bugzilla – Bug 2066
Various Artists and the ALBUMARTIST tag problem?
Last modified: 2008-09-15 14:36:01 UTC
I like the new Various Artists implementation, but I believe it's not quite working how I would have imagined. I like the way Slimserver determines that an album is a various artists album based on more than one "track artist" belonging to the album. This works for the majority of my albums, as I haven't tagged the majority of VA albums with an ALBUMARTIST tag. However, I have some albums where the majority of the tracks are by one artist, but there's one track by a different artist. I don't want these albums to be displayed under Various Artists, rather use the main artist as the album artist. So I thought I could simply tag all of the tracks of that album with ALBUMARTIST=<main artist name> to override the slimserver VA detection. SlimServer still seems to detect that this is a various artist album and pops it under "Various Artists". I assumed the feature would work like "Guess Tags" - if tags are set, use them, otherwise if there are no tags try to guess them, otherwise file under No Artist/No Album. I have "Group compilation albums together" and "Don't include compilation artists in artist list". For an example album that I have been playing around with to test the feature, every track has the same content for the album tag. ARTISTSORT and ALBUMARTIST are both set to the main artist for the album, and the artist tags are variable. The artists are correctly not exploded into the "browse artist" list. The only problem is that the album appears under "Various Artists" rather than ALBUMARTIST. I suppose I could tag all of my various artists albums to have ALBUMARTIST tags, and turn off the slimserver auto detection, but for the majority of cases, slimserver gets it right.
Dan: one thing I think we forgot in our discussion is that if an ALBUMARTIST tag is present, then the heuristics for guessing various artists should be skipped, per this bug.
Large Various Artists / Multiple Artists in Tags update checked in as subversion change 4258.
dip posted: Bug 2066 is not solved in SOME cases. I have an album on which all but TWO songs are of Artist1 and these TWO songs are duetts of "Artist1 and Artist2" and "Artist1 and Artist3", respectively. All songs are OGG VORBIS files and for these two songs the ARTIST tag is set to "Artist1 & Artist2" and "Artist1 & Artist3", respectively ("&" is set as separator). For this album the new Compilation flag is set to "Yes" ALTHOUGH ALBUMARTIST IS SET TO "Artist1" (so it should be an "Artist1" album and not a VA album).
also: I played a little bit around and found that this happens only with OGG VORBIS files but not with mp3 files. In addition I found that even with OGG VORBIS files this happens only if there are AT LEAST TWO files with two DIFFERENT second artists. That means if there is only one song with "Artist1 & Artist2" the album is correctly not classified as VA album. And if there are several duets on the album BUT ALWAYS WITH THE SAME SECOND ARTIST (e.g. "Artist1 & Artist2) then the album is also correctly not classified as VA album.
This is fixed in subversion change 4281. If you have a ALBUMARTIST across all the tracks in that album, it will override any automatic behavior.
Created attachment 823 [details] Test song 1 This bug is NOT fixed in the 2005/9/15 nightly (subversion 4294). I enclose this and three further ogg files (only 10 seconds samples) with which the desribed behavior can be reproduced. Although all files are tagged with ALBUMARTIST=Mike the album has the Compilation flag set to Yes and is shown under Various Artists.
Created attachment 824 [details] Test song 2
Created attachment 825 [details] Test song 3
Created attachment 826 [details] Test song 4 In fact, all songs are copies of the identical song sample which have simply been renamend and retagged.
I just recognized that all test songs are downloaded as attachment.cgi when clicking on the above links. But it seems that one has simply to replace the "cgi" by "ogg" to obtain correct ogg files with the correct tags.
Ok - really fixed in subversion change 4297. Thanks