1. see
http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Album_Artist_and_Album_Artist_%28Auto%29The usual problem encountered is when (for example):
- The album is an album by artist "Joe Blow".
- Joe has a lot of collaborations, so many tracks are correctly identified as:
[Artist] : "Joe Blow featuring John Doe"
- and using the rules in the link above, the album is sorted under "Multiple Artists" rather than "Joe Blow".
For some reason, in the online databases, very few of these albums have the [Album Artist] tag filled out, implying that one or more of the popular music players automatically figures that the [Album Artist] is "Joe Blow".
Since the last discussion of this issue, I've come up with other algorithms that could be used:
A) Almost all of these albums have one track where Joe works by himself, i.e. [Artist]: "Joe Blow", so the shortest [Artist] name in the file folder could be used as a template, and if all other [Artist] names start with the same characters as the entirety of the shortest one, then [Album Artist] is set to the shortest one ("Joe Blow").
B) Compare the first two tracks in the folder. If the [Artist] fields match up to and including N characters, then use the first N characters as a template, and check if all the other [Artist] fields match the first N characters, and if so, then set [Album Artist] to the first N characters ("Joe Blow").
C) Define a list of delimiters, using some of the code used for Articles (a,the), and similarly allow it to be user modified ("Featuring","Feat","Feat.","With"). For the purposes of this process, remove the delimiter and all following characters (which makes "Joe Blow Featuring John Doe" into "Joe Blow"). THEN apply the same code that currently decides whether all the tracks have the same artist. (Since they now all have "Joe Blow", then [Album Artist (auto)] would become "Joe Blow" and the [Artist] fields would continue to have the helpful "Featuring" info.
The last choice uses almost entirely existing MC20 code, and may be the most fool proof, since B can occasionally yield an [Album Artist] of "Joe Blow Featuring" and A also does not work if Joe collaborates on every track.