Bugzilla – Bug 4755
Solo albums are tagged as compilations / extended tags are not used
Last modified: 2008-12-15 13:07:51 UTC
Many solo albums are treated as compilations (i.e are listed under Various Artists) if any of the tracks include a co-artist. For example, I have an album by Al Green (Don't Look Back) where in two songs appears also Curtis Stinger. The result is that the album appears under Various Artists and Al Green does not appear at all when just browsing under artists. I tagged the all the songs in the album with the extended tag BAND (AlbumArtist) = Al Green, but this is completely ignored. The I tagged all the tracks also with the extended tag COMPILATION=0 and now the album is not considered a compilation anym ore (which is infe) but now I get two separate artists Al Green and Curtis Stinger. Obvioulsy by using the AlbumArtist = Al Green tag I am expecting to see only one album under Al Green when browsing Artists. On the other end using the search function and searching for Curtis Stinger should return the two songs on which he appears. So it seems like all those tags are either ignored or not prioritized. I think the priority should be like this: COMPILATION=[0|1] This tag has the top priority in deciding wheter an album is a compilation or not (depending on 0 or 1) overriding the logic based on the AlbumArtist or the single track artists. ALBUMARTIST= (also known as BAND). If this tag is present should override the logic based on the single track artists. For instance if an album artist is given that album will NOT be considered a compilation even if some tracks contain multiple artists ARTIST= (track artist). If none of the previous tags are present than the standard logic will be used to find out wheter an album is a compilation. If an album contains tracks with different artists then its a compilation.
please do not pre-set targets. These are for internal use. thanks.
Alessandro, what type of files are you tagging and what tool are you using to tag? The reason I ask is that ALBUMARTIST and BAND are not actually the same tag and can be treated differently depending on what program you are using to do the tagging and what type of file is being tagged. I have made some notes about this in Bug 4624.
HI Steven, sorry about the preset target, first time I created a bug. All my files are MP3s and I am using Mp3Tag. For the album artist I am using the tag called Band. If I right click on a file and select extended tags it shows me BAND = Al Green. Is this the tag that Slimserver interprets as Album Artist? I read your comments in the other bug you refer too, but I can't see how I can create such custom TXXX tag since Mp3tag only allows me to choose from a list of predefined tags. Thanks, Alex.
Alex, the BAND tag is treated as Band/Orchestra in Slimserver. The options for how this tag is used in Slimserver are the ones you see in Home/Server Settings/Behavior. The ALBUMARTIST tag is completely different and independent of the BAND tag. If you wish to try using this tag with Mp3Tag you would navigate to extended tags and click the add field button. Once the edit tag info window opens you can enter ALBUMARTIST into the field dialog if it is not available in the drop down menu. It is my understanding that for the ALBUMARTIST function to work properly all tracks of said album must be in the same folder on the drive and that all tracks have the same album artist value.
OK, that did the trick! I did create a new ALBUMARTISTS tag and gave it the value of "Al Green" (for all the songs in the album, which by the way are in the same directory). At first it didn't work (still both artists were listed under browse->artists). Then I removed the tag COMPILATION=0 and it worked. Now it shows only one artists "Al Green" when browsing, the album is not listed under Various Artists and if I search I can still find the songs by Curtis Stinger. Everything as it should be!!! So left is the odd behaviour which is setting the tag COMPILATION=0 should not forces all the artists to be listed under Browse->Artists, but that's a minor thing and you welcome close this bug or downgrade it to a P2/3. Thanks for your help. Alex
Looks like the final issue mentioned here is covered by bug 5108, if not a number of other bugs found by a search on the work 'compilation' I think we can mark this one as fixed and focus on the rest.
Fine with me. Thanks for your hard work. Going forward, please make sure to not break the "Album Artist" behaviour :-). I checked SlimServer 7 and it still works perfectly. Thanks.
We'll do our best, Allesandro. Thanks for your help as always, KDF.
This bug appears to have been fixed in the latest release! If you are still experiencing this problem, feel free to reopen the bug with your new comments and we'll have another look. Make sure to include the version number of the software you are seeing the error with.