Bugzilla – Bug 5764
Artists from compilation albums appear to sort incorrectly when there are Sort Artist tags from other tracks in that album
Last modified: 2008-12-18 11:12:53 UTC
The artist for the album comprised of these tracks: \\10.0.3.91\media\Music\Rico's collection\Air-Late Night Tales\ appears as Cat Power, from the track 09-Cat Power-Metal Heart.mp3, but is sorted with the A's, apparently because of track 17-Air and Alessandro Baricco-Musica.mp3
Dean, can I possibly get access to the files in question so I can take a look?
Bug 4584 and Bug 5177 might be related.
Yes, that path is valid on our internal network. Mike can reproduce this on his desktop system.
OK, thanks.
All of the files in question have the tag 'MUSICBRAINZ ALBUM ARTIST SORTNAME' set to 'Air' and with change 13714 for Bug 5296 this is the behavior I expected to see in SqueezeCenter. Is this not the desired behavior?
OK, I am starting to understand the issue here and why it is so confusing. With change 13714 for Bug 5296 SqueezeCenter is now picking up 'Air' for 'ARTISTSORT' for all these tracks. However SqueezeCenter is not picking up 'Air' for 'ALBUMARTIST' leading to the confusing artist list. One solution would be to have SqueezeCenter pickup 'MUSICBRAINZ ALBUM ARTIST' for 'ALBUMARTIST' in addition to the other change. One of the concerns I have for these changes is when a user has both MUSICBRAINZ albumartist and artistsort tags and their own albumartist and artistsort tags. Which one takes precedence? Another concern is when a user does not even realize that there is MUSICBRANIZ tags in the file at all. These tags will not even show up in most editors. Perhaps these changes should be backed out for now.
Yes, we should use as much MB data as possible. IMO, MB always wins because the data is generally highly accurate. If you don't like the MB data and want to add your own tag, you should delete the MB tags.
Andy, I think that would only make sense if SqueezeCenter took all MUSICBRAINZ tags into account and currently it does not. Until then I feel the current behavior leads to confusion from a support point of view. A user could always copy their MUSICBRAINZ tags to the standard tags we currently support too.
Yeah I meant we should take all MB tags into account.
Dean, your thoughts?
It sounds like we agree. The MB tags should all be taken into account and should have precedence.
OK, I'll take a look at what's involved in adding the rest of the MB tags.
What? Really? We're going to take tags that most users probably don't even know they have and that their cheesy tag editors probably won't even let them change and make them the primary source of information for SqueezeCenter? Are you sure?
Sure why not? MB tags are very accurate. The only case where someone might not know a file was tagged by MB was if they pirated it. In that case, who cares, they're on their own.
Indeed, the bug really is that we're inconsistently applying the MB tags. We should fix that.
I spoke with Stephen and Dan about this in person. I didn't realize that the MB support is new and so this bug is new too. Mike and I couldn't diagnose why suddenly the sorting was wrong. If the user didn't tag their own files, they'd have no way to know that MB was at fault and that could cause a call to support. So there are two issues: 1. We're not handling all MB tags consistently. 2. We're preferring MB tags and users may not know that they are there and may not have the tools to view or edit them. This becomes a problem for support. So, I propose that we make sure that all the MB tags are used correctly and provide a preference mechanism for the user to opt-in to having them be preferred. Finally, if we're using these tags, shouldn't we display the tag information in the Song Info screens?
Andy, after looking at the MusicBrainz tagging spec at http://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainzTag I see where you are coming from and I tend to agree with you. I also think that if this is implemented smoothly into SqueezeCenter there would not need to be an opt-in switch. I don't think this can be done properly until Bug 4584 is taken care of however. In the meantime can we disable "MUSICBRAINZ ALBUM ARTIST SORTNAME" to 'ARTISTSORT' mapping? In fact this might be the issue that manifested this reported behavior in the first place.
I've added the MB Album Artist tag mapping and fixed the issue in bug 5296, has that fixed this issue?
That seems to fix it for me - I used to have a number of artists sorted with "Various Artists" when they should have sorted differently. They all seem to be sorted correctly now - many thanks for the fix.
Steven do you see any issues with this fix? Also, what is left of this bug to fix before we can mark it fixed? Anything?
Looks good to me. From what I can tell both MusicBrainz Sortname and MusicBrainz Album Artist mapping has been added to SqueezeCenter. Only MusicBrainz Album Artist Sortname is missing since SqueezeCenter does not currently support AlbumArtistSort and Bug #4584 covers that.
This bug is being closed since it was resolved for a version which is now released! Please download the new version of SqueezeCenter (formerly SlimServer) at http://www.slimdevices.com/su_downloads.html If you are still seeing this bug, please re-open it and we will consider it for a future release.