I've always treated Artist and Album Artist as values used to categorize albums and tracks, and not as a catch-all for various contributors. I also do not place preferential treatment on any Artist in the list, and avoid thinking in terms of "primary artist". That's what Album Artist is for (to override automatic behavior, and force primacy). The main reason that MC selected the first item in the list of artists (when Artist became a list-type field) was to facilitate operations like Rename, which could easily generate insane path lengths. So only the first value was used, in effect, it was listitem([Artist], 0).
In your Immigrant Song track, I would not list Karen 0 as an artist, since I would not want to trigger the Multiple Artists behavior, so instead would place her in a Featuring field. Alternatively, we could just use Album Artist to override, since other players or software won't take Featuring into account.
I just find that things get too complicated when you try to split up the data into separate fields like "Artist" and "Featured Artist".
If it all goes into the Artist field as a list, it keeps things nice and simple, and you can just do a search on Artist, or create a view that is grouped by Artist rather than Album Artist (auto) if you want, for example.
Prior to build 145, albums tagged like my
Random Access Memories example were not being listed under (Multiple Artists) but by the Primary Artist if it was the same for all tracks. (i.e.
Daft Punk) That was the correct behavior, in my opinion.
Using a separate "Featured Artist" tag mostly seems like a way to work around the current Album Artist (auto) system that is in place.
I can see the merits to that system, but it seems like a lot of work, and I would prefer to see improvements made to Album Artist (auto) instead.
Rather than split the Artist data into separate groups to get Album Artist (auto) to behave a specific way, I would have probably chosen to add an Album Artist tag.
I think that generally people are more likely to include featured artists in the Artist field, rather than creating a custom field for it.
Of course those are probably going to be in the format of "Daft Punk feat. Pharrell Williams" rather than "Daft Punk; Pharrell Williams" if they are importing data from another program, but that's another issue.
A number of people have also wanted nice formatting of semicolon separated lists in the form of A and B, and A, B, and C, and have employed expressions to do this. I think I recall writing on for user marko for his images and people values in Keywords. However, I'm reading some conflict in your request:
"Without a specific "band name" as such, you end up with a long string listing all three artists together though, which I don't especially care for."
vs.
"It would be nice if #3 could be "smartly" formatted to be something like "Al Di Meola, John McLaughlin, and Paco de Lucía" instead of using semicolons for Album Artist (auto)."
Sorry if that wasn't clear. I was not particularly fond of the idea of Media Center displaying: "Al Di Meola; John McLaughlin; Paco de Lucía" for Album Artist (auto)
After reading your post though, I do agree that using the full list for the Album Artist is a better solution than lumping it in with compilations under the (Multiple Artists) heading.
However I do think that while it's not ideal, (Multiple Artists) is itself an improvement over listing that as an "Al Di Meola" album, which is how it was handled before.
I would be a lot happier using the full list if Media Center formats it nicely, such as "Al Di Meola, John McLaughlin, and Paco de Lucía", which I think it would be the best general solution for albums that are tagged this way.
If you wanted it to be displayed differently, that would be best handled manually via the Album Artist field.
While you might be able to use expressions to do that type of formatting, it would be nice if Album Artist (auto) did it automatically.
It wouldn't make much of a difference for "power users" such as you or I, who are comfortable using expressions, but I don't think most users would be doing that.
I think the logic required to do auto-detection of Album Artist from, for example, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Soundtrack, might get a little tricky from the point of view of user comprehension (most are baffled by Album Artist (auto) already). In essence, the logic would have to find the longest common list sequence and use that. Maybe that's sufficient, but maybe that's very difficult to intuit or explain.
Yes, that's why I wondered not only if Media Center could do that (I suspected it might) but whether it
should.
The issue then becomes that it's likely to end up being listed as a Trent Reznor album instead if it's only picking the Primary Artist - or worse - listed under (Multiple Artists).
Ultimately, there is always going to be some manual tagging required no matter how smart Album Artist (auto) tries to be, so perhaps the easiest solution would just be to fill out the Album Artist field with "Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross" as I have currently done.
Still... I do like the idea of it filling that out automatically.
If we agree that an album such as
Passion, Grace & Fire with "Al Di Meola; John McLaughlin; Paco de Lucía" should be grouped by that rather than (Multiple Artists) - especially if it's formatted nicely.
And an album such as Daft Punk's
Random Access Memories (tagged as the example above) be grouped under "Daft Punk" for Album Artist (auto)
Then if it's possible, I do think that soundtrack should also be treated as "Trent Reznor; Atticus Ross" for the Album Artist (auto) as well, since they are both listed on every track.
I think the general confusion around Artist/Album Artist tags comes from other Applications using "Artist" as a heading when they are actually displaying "Album Artist" information, so I'm not sure that this would make things any more complicated.
Most people seem to understand how things work once you explain that they need to group their albums by "Album Artist (auto)" rather than "Artist"
I think making Album Artist (auto) a little smarter would improve things for most people, rather than complicating things.
Author
Topic: Tracks with multiple artists will use (Multiple Artists) for Album Artist Auto (Read 10189 times)