[SOLVED] Multiple Genres Bug?

[TheOldPresbyope]

I also already considered how multiple artists could be enabled.

So to be clear we are talking about two distinct tags (ot frames): AlbumArtist and Artist

While AlbumArtist is supposed to have only one single value (as far as interpret the standards),
there may be multiple Artists for a track.

So far, so good, although there is no "standard", just lots of de facto specifications which are ridiculously vague.

All tags are per track, i.e., there is no "Album" entity. Tracks having the same Album tag are considered to belong to the same album. Theoretically tracks with a common album tag can as well have different AlbumArtist tags. But in Moode, as far as I read the code correctly, albums are identified by a combination of Album+AlbumArtist. So tracks with the same album tag but different albumartist tags are displayed as two distinct albums.

The fact that there is no "Album" entity reflects IMHO the birth of music metadata tagging in the portable music player industry where the song was king. Sad really, that the recording industry itself stubbornly refused to consider the possibility of recording complete musicology data to every CD [1], but I can understand the FUD which surrounded this new technology. To them LPs, cartridges, cassettes, and CDs could be treated exactly the same: some medium with a printed label and insert. Then their business got disrupted.

As for using Album+AlbumArtist as an identifier, that seems common practice. While AlbumArtist isn't well defined, its dominant usage is a sorting key to get the album into the right "bin" (to use the analogy of a physical CD in a bricks-and-mortar store) where more than one artist is involved. Interpreted this way, the example you cite seems correct. Of course, it also means that two different albums with "Various Artists" and with the same Album title, "Greatest Hits", say, are considered the same album. Not a problem in the physical store analogy where they just get put next to each other in the bin, but a problem when a digital player aggregates all the tracks into a single "album".

To make things even more complicated, I found tracks with multiple AlbumArtist tags. Some editors allow for adding tags/frames ad libidum and music databases like mpd can also handle this situation.

Whether or not it's possible syntactically to have multiple values, I believe such tracks need to be cleaned so that they have a single AlbumArtist entry.

So as to me, best practice is probably to use one single AlbumArtist tag value with entries of either "Various Artists" or a string of the form "Artist A & Artist B ...".

Agreed, although in my collection I reserve "Artist A & Artist B" for groups commonly billed that way.

Now to the Artist tag. In contrast to the AlbumArtist tag it can have one or multiple values (or to be precise: there can be multiple artist frames per track).

Currently Moode supports only one Artist tag per track. It is displayed with each track when showing the list of tracks for an album or in the player queue.  The Artist tag is also used as a substitute when the AlbumArtist tag is missing.
I think there might be room for improvement.

Isn't this the issue for which Tim has accepted your proposed code patch? Am I missing something here?

It is common for there to be no AlbumArtist entry when none is needed. However, because different players are quite inconsistent in their behavior (see all the agonized cries on various Internet forums) some people have gotten into the habit of explicitly filling in the same value for Artist and AlbumArtist on every track. It's only really needed if there are multiple artists involved, and if it's not there in that case, then, again, I believe the tracks need to be cleaned.

Conclusion:
-- AlbumArtist should have only one value per albun
-- Artist can have multiple values. But we have to think twice on how these may be displayed in tracks view w/o littering the view and what to use as a substitute for a missing AlbumArtist tag in order to uniquely identify an album.

It seems to me moOde already covers the case of no AlbumArtist entry when there is only a single Artist entry. Perhaps just choose the first Artist entry if there is more than one? To do otherwise is to try to second-guess the intent of the folks doing the tagging.

Isn't metadata fun?

Regards,
Kent