Album Artist

[MDE]

I'm getting a bit confused by this - I thought that Muso had its own concept of "titled artist". Now it seems that it is populating album artist with an artist of its choosing, when importing, even if there is no tag in the underlying song file. This interferes with other functionality - e.g the "classical period" filter only seems to find albums who have a composer in the period as titled artist. Since album artist trumps the default titled artist, this removes composers from this role. Hope that is clear, but I'll try and give more info if needed.

[musoware]

An example would be useful - and please clarify whether importing from folder or LMS.

[MDE]

OK - so I have an (excellent) album by the Pavel Haas quartet. The underlying song file does not have an album artist tag. The album artist field in Muso is also empty. If I do an "import from specific folder", Muso decides that the Pavel Haas Quartet (which is in all the Band tags) should be the album artist:

I think that is just discernible in the image.
The work-round that I am using is to add an import action which imports #ALBUMARTIST (unconditionally) into the Muso field. Then if #ALBUMARTIST is blank or does not exist, the Muso field is blank too. The image below is exactly the same "import from specific folder" with the addition of this import action:

However, as discussed elsewhere, once Muso has an Album Artist, it will not delete it when importing from a specific folder, even if the underlying file has no albumartist tag, so applying the import action at a later date does not fix the problem - any fields you want to update have to be erased in Muso first.

As regards the interaction with the "classical period" functionality, what happens is this. Without the album artist, the quartet and the composer get equal billing as titled artists:

With the quartet as album artist, they get the sole titled artist credit. If I filter on "late romantic period" then the album appears if Dvorak is one of the titled artists, but not if the album is only credited to the quartet. (This introduces another question as to whether this filter ought to operate at the album or track level....)
EDIT:
For some reason, using @AlbumArtist in the import action does not work, but #ALBUMARTIST does. All my tags are capitalised by default, but this does not normally seem to create problems (eg I have used @Composer with success, even though the tag is called COMPOSER). In any case, there is no tag with any name like ALBUMARTIST, AlbumArtist, Album Artist etc. in the song file, so the Muso behaviour does seem a bit whimsical.
Also, having played with this file a bit more, I cannot get it to repeat the "dual billing" behaviour - either I get Dvorak or the Quartet, but not both. So in this case, either Muso is being whimsical or I am!

[musoware]

I'll certainly take a look at the first issue - unless the Album Artist song tag exists or there's an import action pointing to it, I think the Album Artist field in Muso should remain blank!

http://musoware.com/wiki/index.php?titl ... te_Mapping

Perhaps send me one of the song files so that I can check what attributes muso is pulling from it - as you can see from the above page it very much depends on file type and tagging scheme.

EDIT: If it's an mp3 using id3v2 tags it might be because it's feeding TPE2 into Album Artist - I seem to remember there was some confusion at the time whether this shoud feed Album Artist or Band, because I think iTunes was (wrongly) using it for Album Artist. I think now it should be feeding Band.

[musoware]

But then again, foobar fed TPE2 into Band up to version 1.1.5 and then switched to feeding it to Album Artist thereafter!

http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?ti ... ag_Mapping

Think we need new Muso options on how to treat TPE2 for classical & non-classical.

[MDE]

The song files are all FLAC. Sending one is a bit awkward, given the size (especially since my "broadband" is supplied over a piece of BT's best wet string). Below is an image from mp3tag of all the tags:

Note that the "Artist" tag does not get imported to Muso - that is just for the LMS display devices. Muso imports a custom field called "mainperformer" which in this case does not exist.
Here are the Muso import actions:

If I remove the "AlbumArtist" import action then it will set the Album Artist to be Pavel Haas Quartet when "importing from specific folder". Obviously, I make sure that this field is blank in Muso before the import, but in any case you can see from the first image in the original post that the AlbumArtist field has been updated from the import.

[MDE]

OK this looks like an Mp3tag bug, not a Muso bug (not an Mp3bug either - see EDIT3 below)! There is a field "Album Artist" which is not shown by Mp3tag. If I use Edit ID-Tag, then it is visible. Deleting it fixes the problem.
EDIT:
This tagging business is pretty subtle and sure confuses me. Here is an image of exactly the same song file with the tags as given by Mp3tag (on the left) and Edit ID-Tag (on the right). You can clearly see that the tag that is called "ENSEMBLE" in Mp3tag appears as "Album Artist" in Edit ID-Tag and I assume therefore that Muso is consistent with the latter unless overidden by a custom tag import. Presumably this is something to do with different tag types, but it's all a bit of a mystery to me!

EDIT2:
And here is the same file in Foobar. No "Album Artist" but an "Artist Name"!:

Anyway the quick fix is to stop using the ENSEMBLE tag.
EDIT3:
Just to put the record straight, then, this is definitely not an Mp3tag bug. Rather it is a "feature" of the way Edit ID-tag and Muso interpret the ENSEMBLE tag as being "Album Artist". Curiously, Muso will read it ENSEBLE as being Album Artist but will also allow a custom import of ENSEMBLE (which is what I was using to populate the "Band" field, which Muso rather confusingly [but not inappropriately] displays as "Ensemble" on the Album Page)!

[musoware]

Hmm, now I'm confused, but I'll double-check what Muso does with an ENSEMBLE (or ENSEBLE??) flac tag.

[MDE]

TYpo! Research shows that some schemes did use Ensemble for Album Artist

[musoware]

OK will check what it does with ENSEMBLE. I'm using a tag library, maybe that makes (wrong) assumptions and feeds it to Album Artist - if so this all probably derives from the confusion concerning TPE2 on id2 tags being used for Band or Album Artist.

EDIT: Yes it does, but I can work round it.