Display of Composers

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MDE
Posts: 479
Joined: Sat Feb 02, 2013 12:05 am

Display of Composers

Post by MDE »

I have started added lyricists for some of my tracks. These are included as a composer tag (I mostly use FLAC which allows multiple tags). So the track may have 2 "composers" (or more). Even though "classical" mode is selected, Muso seems to be reverting to non-classical mode for these tracks. As you can see from the pic, only the first 4 tracks are displayed like this.
4songs.jpg
Is it because the artists are common to the tracks but the composers are not? Even then, I would have thought that R Strauss should be singled out as a common composer.In case it helps, I also include the "edit tracks" screen.
4songs2.jpg
Contrast that with the following (which is again not quite right, but in a different way). Track 1 has WAM as the sole composer, whereas Track 2 has WAM + Sussmayer. The "edit tracks" confirms this, but not shown here. However, Muso credits both tracks to the pair of them.
Horn.jpg
It seems Muso is getting a bit confused by multiple composers, but I'm not quite sure why or how.
musoware
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Re: Display of Composers

Post by musoware »

I think it's because under classical mode the composer is the primary attribute, and there is special processing in place to group tracks with the same composer - so multiple composers could indeed confuse this. Could you not put lyricist under "Artist"? You seem to be putting performers and ensembles under Artist and these have their own fields, so you could free up Artist for this purpose.
MDE
Posts: 479
Joined: Sat Feb 02, 2013 12:05 am

Re: Display of Composers

Post by MDE »

The trouble with using "artist" is that it is one of the standard tags recognized by LMS. That's why there is an element of duplication - so that the artist names get displayed on the Squeezebox Touches. I have a similar issue in that I am also including arrangers in the composer tags - which has a stronger semantic case for it than lyrcists. And what about where there are in fact multiple composers (there are a few such classical works, I think)? I confess that I am testing Muso a bit here, as a consequence of being able to populate with much richer data from MusicBrainz, but it's Muso's superior abilities that makes me such a fan in the first place! I'll continue to ponder work-rounds in terms of tagging styles, but some further thoughts on how Muso should handle multiple composers would be appreciated too :)
musoware
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Re: Display of Composers

Post by musoware »

Indeed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical ... laboration

However those pieces would normally still have a common set of composers across the movements of a piece. I think Muso's getting confused where the true composer is the same but the lyricist differs. I'll give it some thought anyway.
MDE
Posts: 479
Joined: Sat Feb 02, 2013 12:05 am

Re: Display of Composers

Post by MDE »

Nice link! Although many of the 'classical' collaborations are where each composer writes one movement of a larger work, which shouldn't trouble Muso.
Your suggestion of using the Artist tag does look quite nice:
4songs3.jpg
although I haven't tested it across the library.
The problem with LMS can be overcome by using a different tag and importing that into Muso's Artist field. For Muso, however, there are some other implications:
- in the hierarchy view, the Artist field now means something like "supporting composer"
- the performing artists will no longer be "Titled Artists", just supporting artists...
- ... and if you use the hierarchy view for Performers rather than Artists, you lose the sorting capability (an area of potential enhancement anyway, but that's another story...)
So it may work for the album view but is a bit of an awkward hack otherwise.
TBC...
BTW, when making changes like this, I often find that the re-import to Muso does not result in the complete revision of the display (and nor does a 'refresh'), so a restart is required to show the changes.
MDE
Posts: 479
Joined: Sat Feb 02, 2013 12:05 am

Re: Display of Composers

Post by MDE »

musoware wrote:I'll give it some thought anyway.
Any further thoughts? As a (reasonably good) work-round, I have put Lyricist into a custom field. That way it gets displayed in the side panel and doesn't confuse the 'composer' processing. This is OK for most classical music as there aren't a lot of albums with different lyricists. However, I would think that for popular music (although I hate that term - classical can and should be popular too!), where there are different composers and lyricists, it might be more of an issue (although I doubt that much pop music tagging goes beyond simply 'artist').
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