+1 Denti --
yes Matt, this has been brought up in a bunch of posts by Denti and myself and I think this really should be addressed. I think most of the world still alphabetizes things on the last name, but all of the internet tagging does not separate first name/last name into separate fields.
1. Display first name last name
2. Sort last name first name
3. Use ; delimiter for multiple artists
4. Use JRemote/theater view
Now if you remove his number three, its all good. Its what he and I are referring to as multiple artists that causes problems.
However, I do think there are bunch of issues that should be looked at together, because making one work might break something else.
You can get most if not all what Denti and I would like in Standard View by messing with thumbnail text -- but I think for most it is in Theater and Remote Modes where you want this to work. Pane type, admin views are perfect for Standard mode, thumbnail "category" type views shine in JRemote and Theater mode.
Using swap/unswap is ok when you do not have "multiple" artists -- I'm talking about 2 (rarely three) per album globally - on all tracks and not to be confused with a Multiple Artist album like a compilation (why I always use Various Artists to avoid confusion).
The expressions to show do not work the same way in Theater mode as in Standard Mode (which uses [Name] as a variable, referring to Denti's other posts, not as a defined field).
I can get this to work for single artists, but the swap function does not really "parse" on the semi-colon -- I believe (and I think Denti concurs?) it should. eg. for this Album by Coltrane and Ellington =>
http://www.allmusic.com/album/duke-ellington-john-coltrane-mw0000416142 Allmusic's database uses the Slash for their separator. Their database splits these as expected. The Album Artist is BOTH artists; the Album is in both their discographies individually.
If you enter
John Coltrane; Duke Ellington, using the swap function you get
Ellington, John Coltrane; Duke instead of
Coltrane, John; Ellington, Duke. Looking at the tag dump you get 2 individual Album Artists and 2 individual Artists (in this eg. they are the same). Short of this you are limited to using something like "John Coltrane & Duke Ellington" as a unique album artist.
Now maybe with your magic you can tweak that so the function works, but I'm not sure that's enough. I think that in a text field the ";" is treated as pure text not as true separator?
John Coltrane; Duke Ellington is not the same as
Duke Ellington; John Coltrane By creating custom list field like I have been doing for years, you can split them and show them. But if you parse them and then say show them using the swap function (or a regex expression) you run into problems. I have been able more or less to show artist fields and genre type fields swapped or just split this way, but I'm sort of concerned that there is special handling of the Album Artist field which with the Album Artist (Auto) "magic" and the Album it creates sort of a unique identifier -- might be wrong on this tho ... I seem to remember someone who had created unique record ids as a work around (database records not albums)
This is further complicated by the fact that you have to basically create 3 views in different areas of the UI (or create them first in Standard mode, then import them twice - one for theater view and one for remote views). However even importing doesn't always work like in this example because the album covers and thumbnail text are not shown/configured in the same way. This also gets complicated because although you can save a view from standard mode, you can't from the other two modes -- so it is hard to share all three mode views with others or even reinstall on multiple clients/servers in a local system. I guess though this would mean either making all views work like in theater mode or have all three modes work like standard mode (except panes) incorporating the thumbnail text
Now some of this might seem off-topic, but I think they are related in the fact that the architecture of the database and some of the "view" functionality that has been added on over the years are linked and might not be an easy fix. So it might be a good idea to look at this globally at the same time?
But if you could tweak the swap/unswap function it would be a great start.
Also linked to this is that as "relational" fields are limited, it would be nice to be able to not only parse but use the semi-colon to concatenate -- you could have multiple lists joined to records or a soloist and the instrument field, multiple genre handling etc. ..but thats for another thread
If the data base was totally relational (in my limited understanding of what that means) this would not be an issue ... but that would probably mean millions of lines of code would have to be re-written, not to mention incompatibility between versions
Not expecting any miracles, but everything seem to be poured into TV lately and no so much into library management & the UI. Anything you could do or suggest (maybe regex expression that we could copy/paste in the interim), would be great.
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Topic: Artist Name Swapping and Theater View (Read 8210 times)