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[afora]

I have artists who appear under different names (e.g. Radiohead, Thom Yorke, Atoms for Peace) which I really want to show as one in my Artist View. And I do want them to show up 3 times in the hierarchy essentially duplicating exactly the same Album information.

I tried changing Artist of such tracks from the original say <Atoms for Peace> to <Atoms for Peace; Thom Yorke; Radiohead>. But I don't feel it's right as I'm altering the original track fields.

Any suggestions for the best strategy to achieve this in Views?

[afora]

Bumping this question up - and will really appreciate if anybody could share some strategies for a situation like this.
Cheers!

[EnglishTiger]

About the only way I can think of achieving something near to what you want is to set up a new semi-colon delimited list field with a name like "Associated Artists" and, with reference to your example, do not alter the name in the "Artist" tag but add all 3 Names to the Associated Act Names in the "Associated Artists Tag".


Note: Any non-standard modifications to the "Artist" tag i.e., adding in an Associated Artist", can and probably will cause Web Searches to FAIL!

[afora]

A scary quantity of work... Thank you anyway, makes sense!

[blgentry]

Do I understand that you want to establish canonical names for several artists that resolve to one?  For example:

band name                       canonical name
Miles Davis.                      Miles Davis
The miles Davis quintet.    Miles Davis
Miles and friends               Miles Davis

If that's what you want, it's pretty straight forward. 

Brian.

[HPBEME]

If that's what you want, it's pretty straight forward. 

Well don't keep it to yourself Brian… Do tell!

I'm trying to do something similar to what the OP is asking for, but not exactly the same. I've come up with an expression(s) that gets me very close to what I want, but it always fails for a specific circumstance of artists/albums. Rather than try to spell out my situation explicitly, I figure I could first try whatever expression you provide to the OP, and see if I can massage it into something that works for me.

[afora]

If that's what you want, it's pretty straight forward. 

Yes, that's what I was after!

And by meaning straightforward you mean something other than creating a user defined field and then tagging all files over?

[blgentry]

Here's the idea:

Two new fields:

Artist Display
Artist Override

[Artist Display] is the new field that will hold all artist names.  It will hold the regular [Artist] field for normal artists.  For those that you want an alias or an "override" it will hold that value.  You will display and use [Artist Display] in your Artist view(s).

[Artist Display] = FirstNotEmpty([Artist Override],[Artist])

This means that *IF* [Artist Override] has a value, then it uses it.  If not, it defaults to using [Artist] instead.

So, there is data entry required.  Essentially for every artist that you want to have an alias or an Override, you fill out the Artist Override field.  Then [Artist Display] will automatically pick that up.

Examples:

[Artist]                    [Artist Overide]        [Artist Display]
Miles Davis                                             Miles Davis
Miles Davis Quintet   Miles Davis               Miles Davis
Miles and Friends      Miles Davis               Miles Davis               
Pink Floyd                                               Pink Floyd

All of this happens automatically, other than you filling out [Artist Override] where you want to.  Note that you can easily fill out this filed for an entire Artist all at once, across many albums and many songs.  If you have 3 variations like the original example, you only have to fill out the override twice.

I'm not sure if this is exactly what you're after, but it's a well known technique in MC to use 3 fields as I have outlined above.

Good luck,
Brian.

[dtc]

Brian's method is similar to the logic used to swap first and last name for an artist. Generally, you use the SWAP command but can override it manually for names that do not work correctly with SWAP.