Support for multiple artists/album artists

[JoeBuck]

I can't figure how to access this feature if it is already present. However if it is not then please add this feature.

Many tracks/albums contain more than one artist for a given track. There needs to be a way to enter more than one person in the track artist field without creating a new artist made up of the two names.

IE, with mulitple artist track, the same track will show up in both artist's nodes.

For example. If two artists collaborate on a song. Then the aritst field could say: "John Doe/Sally Jane"

but there should be NOT a new artist called "John Doe/Sally Jane" created

Right now I don't know how to delimit multiple artists and get it to work as above.

Also it would be great with this feature if Media Monkey when it tags albums from sources such as Amazon.com would automatically rewrite tags so that instead of artist saying things like "John Doe feat. Sally Jane" it would be artist = "John Doe/Sally Jane"

Sometimes the collaboration is set in the title as:
"A song name (feat Sally Jane)" so this should cause title to be "A song name" and set artist to "original artist/Sally Jane"

I love media monkey!

[agapeincognito]

Unfortunately, I don't believe the ID3V2 specifications support what you're looking for in the Artist field (they have a field for entering other artists which includes such things as Featuring, etc.). I haven't really seen that much also. Even in many duets, the second artist is almost always considered a Feature artist, not the primary artist. In somewhat rarer cases where there actually are two artists on an album, the music industry always lists them together as "Bonnie & Clyde". So if you were to do an internet tag update, you many times won't find the album or song because the databases on the internet are not specifying the artists separately.

The MM devs could set the app to do this I imagine, but only one artist could actually be saved into the music tags outside of the MM database, so you kind of back yourself into a wierd corner.

Additional tags are on the wishlist already. I think your best bet, assuming the additional tags get implemented, is to put one of the artists in the Featuring field. Then we can help you out with a script called MagicNodes which will allow you to create a node which shows an Artist node and includes the album IF they are listed in the Artist field OR the Feature artist field.

I do second your other request though. There should be a mechanism for us to specify a "template" for how internet database results should be parsed into the database.

[baker]

Perhaps the easiest way to implement this would be a special artist node which contained every song in which the artist appears. Can something like that be done with Magic Nodes?

[agapeincognito]

Yes you could, but the only way to do it would be to put multiple artists in the artist field and parse them out somehow. That would mean storing potentially incorrect info in your music tags (if I'm understanding what you mean).

[Anubis]

I've been thinking for a while now about the best way to handle mutiple artists and/or the same song on multiple albums.

I think the best way to handle these situations is to create a new "stubb" file that contains all the ID3 tag info, but instead of the actual song being wrapped up, a pointer to the actual file on your harddisk is contained in the stubb file. That way, we could have a very small stubb file, that points to the the real song file.

We can create as many of these stubb files as we want and change the tags on them to our hearts content to allow for multiple artists and/or albums for a song and/or multiple genre's, moods, titles, etc...

Of course, MM would need to handle these file types. It would need to know read the pointed to file for the actual song when it is played and sync'd. If the original file is moved, then the stubbs would need to be updated.

And if there is a way to identify the file as a stubbed file, then the advanced syncing could be told not to sync it to portable media.

I give full permission to the authours of MM to implement this in the next release of MM.
Hopefully if they do it, it than will then become a standard that other programs will implement.

[baker]

Alternately, perhaps this could be accomplished with a script which automatically built an auto playlist for every artist. Each playlist would be looking for any song which contained the artist name in either the 'Artist' field, 'featured artist' field or' filename' field. Then it would create a separate node for these playlists. Ideally, this script would also allow for other fixed criteria and sorting options.

[MrBretticus]

I would like a nice solution to this also, it's something that's annoyed me about all media players in the past. However I'm not sure if anyones checked it out, but Windows Media Player 10 does this very nicely. You can seperate artists by a ; character. Main artists (this first in the list) will appear under the Artists node and all artists appear under the Contributing Artists node. It's very nice and straight forward to use. Perhaps MM could incorporate something along those lines.

[eeseepoo]

The tune to "various artists" is an inadequate solution to the multiple albums created on compilations. I have 133 compilation CDs and expect the kids to learn who played what. They can't do that with VA. These artists were good to have made the "Best of whatever" compilations. I am now a "lifetime" gold user. I have a 23 GIG library, This all started with an iPod Mini for Christmas 2004. After trying to get on a plane twice and have the thing fail to operate, I bought the Creative Xen Xtra 40GIG in anger and just moved all by files over to it. I believe that iPod has a few fatal design flaws. But courtesy of the Best Buy warranty, I'm on my 3rd and have the 4 GIG Nano. Santa showed up with three 1GIG Samsung necklaces for the kids and installed an iPod dash controller in my car. While on Xmas vacation, I have spent nearly ALL of it on music media management. The week before Christmas, I scrubbed up the iTunes library - reinstalled music that has vanished from dups - and got the disk art the hard way with cut and paste and a few scans. I spent several hours with WMP, rolling back to 9 and up again and finally using a "run" command to get the library to "rebuild." Better yet, I used the "complilations" button and corrected the song artists on dozens of Time-Life "Sounds of this and that." I want the kids to learn the artists and who sang what!

My opinion was that Apple had the most advanced software with iTunes and an a slick, but cr_p product. After searching the net for alternatives,
I was beginning to think I would have spent less time learning to program something myself. You have an AMAZING opportunity here - now - over the next three months at most to really make some money. This opportunity exists because owners of iPods have used iTunes. These owners now have kids and family members buying mp3 players but few are going to lay out the iPod dollars on kids - especially after figuring out you can't buy them a battery. Now you have this huge customer database of music library users with multiple player types, affluent, and ready to pay considerably more to avoid the aggravation. The reason they are affluent is they are generally working long hours on projects that make money. I have spent well over $3000 in my time (would have made if worked on my computer on the time-sheet). Today, I would gladly and with relief spend $99 on a product like yours that could comprehend and deal with compilations. There is no reason
to have ten album names, each with one artist on compiled CD's. The beta is worse than the 1st download in that at least it made an album (Various) that had the files in it. In the Beta, this is not so ...

1. Handle compilations based on subdirectory location. Following the iTunes organizational scheeme, the music is in a Compilations/Album Name storage. Make the MM album be one album with each song in that directory - regardless of artist. Make this occur on every loadup. Right now, even if you fixed the albums, they are wrong again on the next library scan so a user really can't get there from here.
2. Stabilize the album art attachment. It's stable always through Amazon but people own albums that Amazon does not carry, or Amazon lacks adequate or decent graphics. Album art that drops perfectly into iTunes does not drop into MM.

I can't emphasize enough that "VA" is missing the point of why some consumers are laying out the big bucks for these MP3 players - it's part of their EDUCATION - rendered void with VA. And we don't need to be going through 1000 artists to get to the Who and ZZ Top on our players. Why can't the directory structure be like auto-organized by iTunes - into a Compilations directory - then album directory - but when a song is playing, you can see the artist. The Troggs really deserve credit for Wild Thing! Help! You programmers are us consumers only hope! Why can't you detect albums through the directory structure - the filepath - on Compilations?

It seems like an IF...THEN type. When building the library from the user defined music folder, if a directory COMPILATIONS is detected, THEN detect/create directory/albums within that directory by including all files with that directory as a single album and don't write artist name beside that Album. Use same parameter when writing to player.

[timwi]

ID3V2.3 says mulitple strings in text fields are to be separated by "/". Id3V2.4 says multiple strings in text fields are to be spearated by a NULL. If multiple values are implemented, please implement them based on the standard.

[Lowlander]

MediaMonkey follows the standards. The main gripe is that MediaMonkey still doesn't support ID3v2.4 which leads to problems with other applications. Also the use of non-standard implementations of other applications leads to complaints from MediaMonkey users. Another limitation is the tag standards of the different file formats. I believe that the developers try to add things that the mayority of file formats supports in order to not confuse the user.

I believe that ID3v2.4 will find it's way into MediaMonkey 3.0, we'll just have to wait and see what the developers do.

[WPtest]

I agree completely that we need better solutions for managing these two conditions:

Multiple artists on each song.
I would like the same song to show up under the Artist listing for each artist performing on the song. Is there an easy way to do this?

Songs by different artists on each CD (compilation CDs).
I sort by Artist, like a lot of people, and I end up with a huge "Various Artists" directory. Not an elegant way to handle it. Is there a better way?

[willvill]

i have found that setting album artist to various while keeping the real artist in artist works well for organization and holds multi artist albums

[WPtest]

I think you are right. Using Various Artists is probably the best way to do this. But its no substitute for being able to have having multiple names in the Artist field, like WMP. Is that really slated for the next version?

[Bex]

Yes!
http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewto ... 4896#44896

[Mizery_Made]

Forgive me, I read this thread probably a month or better ago, I tried reading it again tonight to refresh and whatnot, but my eyes are feeling a little droopy as I'm in need of sleep.

Anyway, I think I got the jist that this refers to a similar feature to that of Windows Media Player (only other Media Player I'm really familiar with) in which an artist listed as "Artist 1; Artist 2; Artist 3" shows up in Artists nodes for all three, and not a new with that exact text? If so, by god, this is extremely needed. Namely for the Artist & Composer nodes. Tis the only thing I miss badly about moving from WMP.

If not... sorry, I'll probably re-read this thread tomorrow when I can process it, Lol.