Split artists by comma

[poly2it]

The artist field commonly contains multiple artists separated by commas. This is especially common for classical recordings. A mass may for example feature different soloists throughout an album, and a classical CD might credit both the performer and the composer. Currently these albums are jumbled up, split into unorganised subsets of the original albums where the artist field is equal.

My suggested solution would be to treat all comma separated artists as separate entries and to filter the albums where an artist is present for a subset of the contents when an entry is selected. This solution makes sense for all cases where an album has an artist performing throughout all recordings (the common case).

[rien333]

Are there any other music players doing this? Like, taking the string in the (album)artist tag, and splitting it by comma?

IMO, a cleaner solution is for music in your library to have a repeatable "performer" (or w/e) tag, and for music players to just combine them.

Also, there is minor problem with your solution, namely that not everybody uses the same delimiter to separate artists. My library (which has gone through an autotagger) also contains "&" and "/" as a delimiter.

[SoongNoonien]

Hi!
For these kind of use cases multi-value tags should be used. Most tag editors provide a way to store multiple values for one tag. So a track could have two tag fields both named ARTIST but with two different values. This is supported by MPD and Plattenalbum. If all tracks of an album have artist A and artist B stored in the tags, it will appear under artist A and under artist B. Could this be a solution for you?

[poly2it]

Hello!
I was not aware that there could be multiple ARITIST tags, it is not something I have ever come across in any music archives. Is it standardised? I have seen the comma solution a few times though, but I may migrate my library to use multiple tags if it is a standard. I think it's up to you if you want to support both options.

[SoongNoonien]

Is it standardised?

Yes, since ID3v2.4 and Vorbis tags support it as well.

I think it's up to you if you want to support both options.

I don't want to implement something like this by hand.

[poly2it]

After splitting the artist tag for a few works, it seems that Plattenalbum only recognises the first artist in the scrollable artist list. I can still search for works by an artist if I write their name explicitly in the search view. Plattenalbum also displays only the first artist for each piece.

[SoongNoonien]

This sounds like a tagging issue. I've just made a test over here and it is working fine. If you're interested you could send me a sample file so I can take a closer look.

[poly2it]

Good idea. I have created a sample file which can reproduce this error. It should have three artists. The first artist shows up correctly. I used Picard to create the multi-value tag. The work is originally derived from Galway by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), and was built upon in the Espressif Audio Development Framework documentation.

gs-16b-2c-44100hz.zip

The work is freely licensed: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/.

[SoongNoonien]

Ok, so this is an m4a file. I'm not familiar with those. Apparently MPD doesn't support multi-tags with those. But maybe these multi-tags aren't supported for m4a files at all.

[poly2it]

Ok, so this is an m4a file. I'm not familiar with those. Apparently MPD doesn't support multi-tags with those. But maybe these multi-tags aren't supported for m4a files at all.

This might be useful:
https://community.metabrainz.org/t/multiple-value-artist-tag-in-m4a-not-showing-in-musicbee/638251/2