Bugzilla – Bug 4509
Support for canonical artist names
Last modified: 2007-02-01 19:02:04 UTC
Forked from bug#616. Possibly obsoletes bug#2164. For artists, we currently have a "display" name (ARTIST), and a "sort" name (ARTISTSORT), but it appears we may need a third "canonical" name (ARTISTCNAME?). The reason is that when browsing artists, some artists have multiple permutations of their name which cause multiple artist entries to appear on the browse list (Example: Elvis Costello, Elvis Costello and the Attractions, Elvis Costello and the Brodsky Quartet). This complicates browsing because if you are looking for one album or track, it is not always obvious which name you need to look under. So I'm proposing that SlimServer manage this canonical name as a separate value, and use it in the "Browse" mode as the artist name. The canonical name could be derived from: 1) If the track has an ARTISTCNAME (or whatever) tag, that canonical name is used 2) If the SlimServer contains a mapping file of artist names to canonical names, the canonical name could derived from this (proposed in bug#616) 3) If no canonical name can be found using the above methods, the ARTIST name is considered to be the canonical name Potential solution without using custom tags or mapping files (for those averse to "nonstandard" solutions): SlimServer could consider all tracks with identical ARTISTSORT tags to have the same canonical artist. Then, the ARTIST name that matches the beginning part of all other ARTIST names is considered the canonical name. If no ARTIST name matches this criterion, then the ARTIST name that appears most frequently among those matching artists is considered the canonical name. Thus, using the Elvis Costello example, if all three variations are tagged with an "ARTISTSORT=Costello, Elvis" tag, then SlimServer can know they are all the same artist, and use some logic to determine the best name to display in the browse function.
I've done some experimenting and have found that using ALBUMARTIST can achieve some (but not all) of the desired effects. If, for example, you tag your Elvis Costello & the Attractions albums with ALBUMARTIST=Elvis Costello, you get the following good result: 1) All Elvis Costello albums are grouped together, with and without the Attractions, when browsing by artist (hooray!!) 2) If you have other Elvis Costello albums with ARTISTSORT tags set to Costello, Elvis, then these albums using ALBUMARTIST will sort correctly (unexpected bonus!) ...and the following not-so-good results: 1) The Now Playing screen no longer displays the track artist even when configured to do so when ALBUMARTIST is defined 2) If you do NOT have other Elvis Costello albums, then there is no way to make an ALBUMARTIST-tagged track sort correctly What is the status of ALBUMARTIST support? It is not listed as a supported tag in http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.cgi?SlimServerSupportedTags. Is there a chance the current support could be removed or significantly changed? I believe the purpose of this tag is for compilations, but I believe it can support this new purpose without losing any of its compilation capabilities. Assuming ALBUMARTIST support will remain more-or-less intact, I believe this may be a solution for this problem. The two problems I've identified could be resolved by having the Now Playing screen always display the track artist, and adding support for ALBUMARTISTSORT. Open new bugs?
Problem #1 seems fixed in bug#4024 There doesn't seem to be a feature request for implementing ALBUMARTISTSORT, so I'll go ahead and create one.
The new bug is 4585. Is there anything left in this bug that is not covered in 4584? or shall I close it?
I think you're right and it's OK to close this. I have not yet had a chance to experiment with ALBUMARTIST, but it looks like it solves my problem (originally from bug 616 then moved to this bug).
New bug is 4584 actually. Assuming ALBUMARTIST support in SlimServer is to remain largely unchanged, go ahead and close.
The other part of this bug was spun off to bug 4584. I'm closing the original. (if you format it that way it creates a clickable link between bugs :) *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 4024 ***