Multiple Artists, ';' separator, etc. - discussion

[ZvezdanD]

ZvezdanD has a quite a point about using the Involved People field for something other than it was intended.

Thanks for giving me a credits, but I am not the first one who said that, even in this thread (please take a look on Mizery_Made post).

while it would be nice to be able to keep track of how much I paid for an album, unlike ZvesdanD, I'm not looking to add that functionality to MM.

Actually, I don't need such information. But I know many people who want this and other similar information related to albums, which MM don't support.

I see a lot of potential for MM as a database, not just a music tagger/player.

Exactly. I need a good database program with a good support for audio-files (as we have with MM) and somewhat better support for albums/artists information (as we don't have). After reading my posts maybe you think that I prefer one universal application, but this is not a true. I hate universal solutions which try to cover so many purposes. I don't even need a player in MM, nor CD ripper, CD burner, audio converter... Just need a good database.

If I didn't, I wouldn't use it.

Well, I cannot say that. Please don't get me wrong. I am not saying that MediaMonkey is bad. In my opinion, MediaMonkey is the best audio-files database program, even in this moment. Just need small improvements, and not degradations as it is suggested with the Involved people.

[spacefish]

Okay, sorry if I offended you, ZvezdanD. I did see others post about Involved People; should have said ZvesdanD and others. I'm entirely confused by your replies to my post but that's nothing special for me. I'm easily confused!

I'll just be over here now.

[ZvezdanD]

Okay, sorry if I offended you, ZvezdanD.

??? Why you sorry? You didn't offended me. Didn't you saw a smile in my post? :(

[spacefish]

Okay, sorry if I offended you, ZvezdanD.

??? Why you sorry? You didn't offended me. Didn't you saw a smile in my post?

Like I said, I'm easily confused. No worries.

[MoDementia]

";"

[jiri]

Jiri, you didnt respond to my e.g. or Practical example (excluding Involved poeple).

I think that these are rather implementation details only and we should be able to do it so that there will be minimal user intervention needed. Your examples suggest to:

1. Have a small DB of artists containing some of the common separators in their name (like already mentioned AC/DC). I suppose that we could include few of such artists/bands so that user doesn't have to handle this manually.

2. When user once manually tells MM how to correctly separate artists, MM should properly handle e.g. type corrections - I think that it should be quite easy to implement.

Jiri

[MoDementia]

";"

[DaledeSilva]

Artist: Artist1 & Artist2 feat. Artist3

Involved People: (Not implemented this way in MM 3.0, but is planned)
Person1 Guitar
Person2 Bass
...

And it would be in tag:

Artist (TPE1): Artist1 & Artist2 feat. Artist3
Inv.People(TIPL or other): Person1/Guitar/Person2/Bass/Artist1/Artist/Artist2/Artist/Artist3/Artist

If the standards specify that multiple artists should be separated by the semi-colon character..

then I think that in the tag it shouldn't be this:

Artist (TPE1): Artist1 & Artist2 feat. Artist3

as mentioned.. but rather,
Artist (TPE1): Artist1 ; Artist2

only putting artist 3 in the involved people tag.

This way, in other programs, the song is still listed under artist 1 and 2 seperately - instead of a single artist called "artist 1 & artist 2 feat. artist 3)

Dale.

[grommet]

jiri, it seems with the change... MediaMonkey splits MP3 Album Artist, too, using the internal "/".

Album Artist can only be a single name, by design, in either MP3 (TPE2) or WMA (WM/AlbumArtist) in WMP 10/11, Explorer shell, etc. So, when WMP 11 sees a "/" in ID3v2.3 Album Artist (TPE2)... it does not split them: TPE2 "Alpha/Beta/Gamma" is actually treated as a single name: "Alpha/Beta/Gamma".

In theory, the ID3v2.3 specification does not say TPE2 should support multiple names like it does for TPE1... but that can be debated, since it doesn't say it shouldn't.

Anyway, just wanted to mention this behavior and ID3v2.3 interoperability difference. I've never wanted multiple Album Artists for an album; it doesn't make sense to me. But I'm sure others might. It won't make much of a difference to me, since / rarely appears in my Album Artist field... and I can use another character to avoid it if necessary.

(For WMA content, MediaMonkey stores the Album Artist as a single name internally.)

[Teknojnky]

Here is another problematic artist:

+/-

1155 is changing this to +; - instead of leaving it +/-

[chrisjj]

1. User could enter any text in Artist field, a wild example would be:
Artist1 & Artist2 / Artist3 ; Artist4 | Artist5 feat. Artist6

2. MM would try to intelligently parse it, so that it would know that this track should be shown under all of these artists (i.e. Artist1-6).

PLEASE NO. That would mess-up all literal uses of those characters. If MM really must implement non-standards-compliant separators, then PLEASE make this an option, off by default. And make the separator set user configurable.

further details about multliple artists the track belongs to would be stored in special fields - so far not defined by any standard.

Please finish the implementation of the standards before going beyond them. MM still falls short of ID3V2.3 multiple artists.

it should handle all the requirements.

What you've described does not handle the requirement for standards-compliance. Much as I like MM, if development is not aiming for compliance with ID3V2.3, I'd really like to hear about that before investing any further time in the program.

[jiri]

Chrisjj, you quoted my original post from this thread, please read also the subsequent posts, you will find that what I propose tries to not only be very flexible, but actually _very_ standard (ID3v2 in particular) compliant.

Jiri

[chrisjj]

> Chrisjj, you quoted my original post from this thread

No, Jiri, I quoted your second post.

> please read also the subsequent posts

I did do.

> you will find that what I propose tries to not only be very flexible, but
> actually _very_ standard (ID3v2 in particular) compliant.

Actually no, what I found was "we want to keep MM easy to use and respect standards as much as possible" and that does not at all look to me like "very standard", especially in the light of the recent deterioration of compliance due to MM's new standard-incompatible interpretation of ';'.

I saw no mention in your subsequent post of any fix to the ';' problems. If I missed it, I'm sorry. If I didn't, I'm even sorrier. And would very welcome some reassurance that this is going to be addressed. Specifically, that MM will stop interfering with usage of literal characters such as ';' that is entirely within the standards.

[jiri]

I saw no mention in your subsequent post of any fix to the ';' problems. If I missed it, I'm sorry. If I didn't, I'm even sorrier. And would very welcome some reassurance that this is going to be addressed. Specifically, that MM will stop interfering with usage of literal characters such as ';' that is entirely within the standards.

I'm sorry, but I tried to be as clear as possible and I still believe that all my posts in this thread together form a good proposal of how solve this problem in a user-friendly way and within standards (as much as possible - since they simply can't handle this issue in its entirety).

Note that I don't think that the current (MM 3.0.3) solution is bad, it's pretty much the same approach WMP11 has, it's reasonably simple and yet powerful, but it definitely isn't perfect and yes, ';' character gets a specific meaning, which is entirely fixed in my proposal for future versions.

This thread was started so that users can describe their requirements and make some suggestions. So far, this was only partly successful, for the rest of the thread I was accussed of either following standard too much or too little. I'd certainly welcome other good suggestions of how to handle this issue, keeping in mind some (in my opinion good) requirements raised by users. Let's say I have tracks:
Track1 by: Artist1 and Artist2
Track2 by: Artist3 & Artist4
Track3 by: Artist1, Artist2 & Artist3 feat. Artist4
In all cases I want the whole artist title to look _exactly_ as above, but correctly be shown under individual artists (e.g. Track1 under Artist1). Feel free to suggest how to handle this in UI and how to store this in tags.

Jiri

[ZvezdanD]

I don't know if this is technically possible, but... How about using TXXX (User defined text information frame) instead of IPLS (Involved people list)?

Using this you have two choices:
1. enabled display of multi-artist in all programs which support multi-values, but in other programs single-value display is not so elegant:
TPE1 = Artist1/Artist2/Artist3/Artist4
TXXX
- Description = Multi-Artist
- Value = Artist1, Artist2 & Artist3 feat. Artist4

2. elegant single-value display in programs that don't support multi-values, but not enabled display of multi-artist even in those programs which support multi-values (except of MM):
TPE1 = Artist1, Artist2 & Artist3 feat. Artist4
TXXX
- Description = Artist001
- Value = Artist1
TXXX
- Description = Artist002
- Value = Artist2
TXXX
- Description = Artist003
- Value = Artist3
TXXX
- Description = Artist004
- Value = Artist4