Rockbox 4.0 - Album Artist changed behaviour

[croxis]

Having upgraded from 3.15 to 4.0 I noticed the Album Artist menu on the Database is not showing any artists when the album artist is not present. In other words, I only see listed files which have an album artist tag present.

What can I do to restore the previous behaviour?

[Bilgus]

It used to be we mushed them all together which created some issue when both existed
you should be able to go to 'Artists' which I think will still mush them together but
not 100% on that

[croxis]

It used to be we mushed them all together which created some issue when both existed
you should be able to go to 'Artists' which I think will still mush them together but
not 100% on that

Going to 'Artists' has all the Artists mushed together yes, this is the same as 3.15 when going to 'Artists'.
What changed was the behavior of 'Album Artist' where in 3.15 it wouldn't show the Artists values if there was an 'albumartist' tag present. Meaning it wouldn't list Artists from compilation albums and instead had a 'Various Artists' artist which is what I use on all my compilation albums on the 'albumartist' tag. (this is my desired behaviour).

[Bilgus]

Sorry was a bit fuzzy on the changes around this

several of the devs were discussing this as the patch came through and nearly reverted it

it is different than the previous behavior but after checking it out
I feel that its probably correct in regard to the other tags
going to <Untagged> will get the rest of the entries and pretty much give you similar.
Not exactly the same though since there is now separation between the <untagged> tracks and the ones that do actually have an album artist

That said if there is interest I can come up with a custom entry to get you the old behavior

[croxis]

Going to [Untagged] on 'Album Artist' lists all the albums which is not intended.

That said if there is interest I can come up with a custom entry to get you the old behavior

I'm interested on this, I have created a tagnavi_user.config copied from the original:

Code: [Select]

# Define the title of the main menu
%menu_start "main" "Database"
"Album Artist" -> albumartist   -> album  -> title = "fmt_title"
How do I go about changing this?

[Bilgus]

https://www.rockbox.org/wiki/DataBase#tagnavi.config_v2.0_Syntax
you make a custom entry

[croxis]

I need help creating it.
Here are my unsuccessful attempts:

These seemed straightforward but I can't seem to find a solution with the syntax. Neither of these worked.

Code: [Select]

"Album Artist" -> albumartist | artist  -> album  -> title = "fmt_title"
"Album Artist" -> albumartist ? albumartist | artist  -> album  -> title = "fmt_title"

[bahus]

I'm not expert in tagnavi so I might be wrong but from what I see in docs   - <filter> (that's what you try to define) doesn't support custom formatting. It's defined as simple as:

is a tag field (see below for supported tag fields)

The only place that supports custom formatting is track title:

Note: a %format string can be used for formatting only the track title. It cannot be used for formatting within the album hierarchy

[croxis]

Should I just re-tag my entire library?

Copying 'artist' -> 'albumartist' on everything that isn't a split or compilation? Seems a bit redundant.

I can't seem to figure out the custom entry for the previous behaviour.

[Bilgus]

give me a day or two I have to look into how the custom entries work in regards to the empty "" string as it keeps popping a search prompt, an option is to add artist to all the album artist fields but I'd rather not make users do that

[croxis]

Changing the topic to better reflect the discussion.

I've found these discussions to be relevant:
https://gerrit.rockbox.org/r/c/rockbox/+/3806
https://gerrit.rockbox.org/r/c/rockbox/+/3947

Use of the 'Album Artist' and 'Artist' tags for compilations was a big point of contention but what I usually see is people using the 'Artist' tag and put 'Various Artists' on 'Album Artist' on compilations.
Examples of this:
https://community.mp3tag.de/t/compilations-artist-album-tag/49911/4
https://community.mp3tag.de/t/tagging-compilations/49402/3
https://support1.bluesound.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360033430213/comments/360008160374

EDIT: changed wording and added examples

[Bilgus]

Well the issue isn't the formatter its that we can't have multiple filters in a single level.
artist->albumartist->album
but what we need to get the previous behavior is artist | albumartist->album
which was hardcoded fallback behavior previously

IDK I'd say maybe we'll come up with something better but probably better to just fill in the empty albumartists for the time being


we've some changes on the database that may make this less painful for your particular use case

[bahus]

issue isn't the formatter

Well, it depends on how you look at this issue. One possible solution for this issue is to introduce support for a few built-in custom tags (like adding to a predefined list of tags in code custom_tag1, custom_tag2) with the ability to define formatters for them. And configuration could look something like this:

Code: [Select]

#Not sure if it's correct formatting syntax, but something like this:
%custom_tag1 "albumartist_or_artist" "%s" albumartist ? (albumaartist != "" )
%custom_tag1 "albumartist_or_artist" "%s" artist ? (albumaartist == "" )

"Album Artist" -> custom_tag1 -> title = "fmt_title"

This way, custom_tag can be indexed at the db creation step, and there is no need to dynamically merge data at each menu access. That's just a rough proposal for discussion I didn't really inspect the code closely.

[Bilgus]

The issue currently is that we are using an awful lot of resources for this database and its already quite unwieldy
to the point we don't really want to add more on top of this

I've been exploring adding some kind of scripting language to core
current contenders are [Micropython, Lua, TCL]
I've done some work towards both micro python and lua but I think they are both going to be too heavy
on ram and bin size to work here

the only thing I have against TCL is the fact thats its a whole other language but it may be the best way forward

I have at least 3 parsers this would eliminate and allow us to expand the syntax and hopefully still be able to be backwards compatible

[croxis]

I have decided against retagging my entire library and use the 'Artist' section on the Database.

It seems like only downgrading to 3.15 would bring the previous behavior back, which I won't do. Maybe when a better scripting language is added it would be possible like you suggest.

Thank you everyone for the feedback and suggestions.