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Album friendly Media Library setup thoughts (long)

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kstuart:

--- Quote from: MrC on February 21, 2013, 01:08:55 pm ---Because *any* field can be treated (i.e. cast) as a list type in a view, it really doesn't matter much.  What the user needs to do is enter data in a format compatible with presentation as a list.  For the OCD crowd who has trouble changing "with" into ";", this will require more expression work.  But for those more pragmatic souls, using a consistent item separator makes life much easier.

--- End quote ---
The problem is that the software cannot determine what is a collaboration.

"Carlos Santana & John McLaughlin" are two musicians collaborating.

" Derek & the Dominos " is a fictional name (based on the fact that an announcer misheard "Eric" and announced the band as "Derek".)

MrC:
But you can.  You can use & for a separator consistently, and use "and" when you don't want separation (this is just one solution).  I know this will bother you.  And it shouldn't, because the bands themselves can't pick one over the other.  Go take a look at Derek and/& the Dominos over at the AllMusic.com site and examine their three listed album covers.  Case closed.

kstuart:
But there are two other factors:

* If you collect "Cream" and "Derek & the Dominos" mainly for the Eric Clapton content, then you want the Artist to be:

Eric Clapton ; Cream

Eric Clapton ; Derek & the Dominos

and the Album Artist to be:

Cream

Derek & the Dominos

* glynor mentioned that he wants all the "Béla Fleck with the Flecktones" to appear under "Béla Fleck" as well as the solo "Béla Fleck".   Similarly, I want "The Miles Davis Quintet"  "The Miles Davis Quartet" and so forth to appear under "Miles Davis".

It's certainly true that if you started from scratch, and used all Custom Fields, you could get something that was more elegant and direct, but then you lose all compatibility with the Rest of the World.

MrC:
There are always going to be exceptions and other factors.  The key is find a system that works and use it, and let go of the idea you can make life fit into a simple set of perfect, exception-free rules.

For glynor's case, "Béla Fleck with the Flecktones" can be tagged as "Béla Fleck & The Flecktones" and use & as a separator (or even "Béla Fleck; The Flecktones", or even "Béla Fleck with the Flecktones;  Béla Fleck; The Flecktones").  Again, Béla and his band aren't consistent (few are, btw), so why should you or I assume one way is correct and another way is incorrect?  Be pragmatic - do what works.

In your case of Miles Davis and his various incarnations, I'd set the Album Artist to Miles Davis, and set Artist to whatever you want.

InflatableMouse:
Thanks for taking the time and write this up. You have some good tips and ideas here.


--- Quote from: kstuart on February 21, 2013, 11:08:36 am ---Date -  The date when the album was released

The point here is to give power to the widely used "Year - Album" sorting method, so that Album lists become:

1957 - Blue Train
1958 - Soultrane
1960 - Coltrane's Sound
1961 - The Complete Village Vanguard

Which allows one to choose to listen to an album from a certain era (eg 50s - bop, early 60s - modal, late 60s - avant garde).  In contrast, the online databases have been filled with Date tags that use the version release date, for two reasons - 1) the inexperienced tag submitters don't actually know the original release date, while the version release date is easily found, right there on the back cover, or else 2) the experienced tag submitter knows the original release date by heart, so what is important to him is the version release date.

--- End quote ---

I'm not sure I understand this one, but I understand the problem.

I want my [Date] field to contain the original release date of an album. I'm considering adding an extra field for the re-release (ie, version release date). I've also added an extra field for the version, which you call Description but maybe I can combine the two, I don't know yet.

I was using Music Brainz Picard with the API key that allows scanning of songs and picking the right album. With my properly ripped CD's this works fine but it not always picks the proper album version and sometimes notoriously picks some various album type for 1 particular song. Editing some tags and rescanning mostly fixes that. Do you think mp3tag with Discogs works better?

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