Rockbox 4.0 - Album Artist changed behaviour

[HandUndFuss]

Hi there,

I'm in the same boat. 4.0 behavior is the worst of both worlds. Why?

I learned from foobar2000 tagging that the proper way to do it is as follows:

Album Artist is the tag that gets used *only* if the album contains several artists, or artists-per-track, and you want to put the album under the umbrella of a single artist. Be that a regular artist, or "Various Artists". This all goes in the Album Artist tag.

The Artist tag is used for the artist of *the track*. This could be the same artist for the whole album, as it is most of the time, and it could be many different artists if the album is VA.

But 4.0 handles it in a way that the "Artist" field of the library throws every individual artist in there. It does not respect Album Artist. I.e. if an album has *both* fields, it should always use the Album Artist as the "blanket" artist that gets shown. And yet the Album Artist field of the Database seems to be only populated with those few albums that have an Album Artist tag present. Put simply: Having Various Artists albums and compilations in the Database makes the "Artist" field of the Database unwieldy and pointless to traverse when looking for whole albums to play.

Foobar2000 doesn't handle it like this, and foobar2000 is pretty much a standard.

I would also strongly encourage you to change this behavior, or to allow a toggle for it. As it is currently, I am forced to use the "Files" option which makes the Database pretty much superfluous.

Looking at how indepth the Database can be searched, such as by Year, or First Letter, or Recently Added or whatever, I would also encourage you to get rid of the dead weight options which hardly anyone uses and get the core functionality of Artist / Album playback right. Especially if this might make the Database quicker.

Lastly, thanks for still working on Rockbox and making a new version.

[HandUndFuss]

One relatively simple way to improve the current behavior might be:

In the Database view, have "Album Artist" also list those albums that have a single "Artist" tag throughout.

[Frankenpod]

I'm not clear what the issue that you are having is, to be honest.

Also being honest, I don't use the database very much at the moment, because it takes so long to create it or update it (and I'm constantly adding tracks).  Haven't done a 'recreation' of it for a while, so of late have been using the files menu (note to self: do a full database creation again!)

  But I recall when I did use it, I didn't have a problem with the "artist" or "album artist" categories.

  I mostly used "album artist", except when searching for that lone track from an artist I don't have much music from, but which is on a compilation album somewhere. Or if I was looking for a track by an artist that I have albums from, but that single rare track was only ever on a compilation and I can't remember which compilation it was on.

The "artist" list indeed, tends to be quite unwieldy because of the sheer number of obscure artists that only pop up on compilation albums.  In fact it's full of artists that I can't remember having heard of ("who the hell are they, and what are they doing in my music library?").  Seems these obscure artists are apparently in my cd collection somewhere on a compilation album or music magazine cover disk and so got ripped to mp3 along with everything else (one day I'll get round to actually listening to them).

 But that's pretty much what I'd expect, given that the _whole point_ of the "artist" category, as far as I'm concerned, is to find those odd maverick parts of my collection.

Otherwise, when looking for the artists I have full albums by, I'd just use 'album artist'.  Can you not just do that?

Or am I missing something about how 4.0 works?  I'm not sure if I've even used that as such, I tend to just always use the most recent dev version.

[HandUndFuss]

Cheers,

The one thing that makes it unwieldy is that I only have Album Artist tag for albums that need an Album Artist tag. Albums that have a single artist, I've tagged using the Artist tag.

With that set-up, neither of the 2 options is able to show me *all* albums, by artist, without the mess of all the individual artists only existing in VA compilations.

[Frankenpod]

Ah, I see.  It would be up to the developers then, I suppose, if they wanted to change the way "album artist" category worked, to default to "artist" if there's no album artist tag filled in.
  I generally always fill in the album artist when ripping a CD (media monkey seems to fill in the album artist to be the same as the 'artist' field, by default as soon as you click on the 'album artist' entry field)

[Edit] maybe you could use something like mp3tag to do a bulk operation setting the "album artist" to be equal to the "artist" field but only for anything currently with an "unknown" album artist?  I can't remember if mp3tag allows conditional operations like that, but it might.

[Bilgus]

I've a patch
if you create a file named virt_albumartist.db
in the rockbox dir and build the database it
fills albumartist with artist if missing here:
https://gerrit.rockbox.org/r/c/rockbox/+/6514

[amachronic]

There was quite a bit of argument about what the "correct" behavior should be when the change to album artist behavior was proposed. Ultimately I accepted the patch for three reasons: (1) I agreed that the old way of inferring album artist from artist was problematic for specific tagging schemes; (2) it did not seem useful for dealing with arbitrary input from users who don't maintain their tags; (3) it only changes behavior when the album artist tag is blank/missing.

Personally I think leaving tags blank as a way to convey meaning is asking for trouble because you're forcing software to infer the content of missing tags from other tags, and there isn't a single rule that works for everyone because there is no widespread agreement on how to interpret this kind of tagging scheme. Rockbox can certainly support different options, but at the moment this means adding settings you configure before building the database like Bilgus's patch. (I'm not at all opposed to that, but it's less than ideal from a UX point of view.)

What I recommend is to always explicitly populate all tags with the data you want. That way, Rockbox and pretty much every other piece of software will use and display that data correctly without any special configuration.

[HandUndFuss]

Thank you guys. Thanks also for the patch.

I realize my and OPs message is the typical "It used to work for me!" use case regression where you could argue our approach is wrong. Unfortunately with music tagging what's 'perfect practice' is a bit up in the air. Some people say the AA field is not necessary if Artist is consistent across the album, but not all players work like this. Having the AA field always present is certainly the idiot proof approach. I'm considering masstagging my music archive to be done with it, but getting this right is a bit of a risk in case something doesn't work.

Here's how it can be done with the foobar2000 Masstagger plugin. There may be breakage if individual tracks of an album have an AA tag that deviates from the newly written tag, for some reason. What this does exactly is check if the Album Artist tag is empty, and if the Album tag exists. Both being the case, it will copy the Artist tag to Album Artist.

Select "Format value from other fields"
Destination field: ALBUM ARTIST
Formatting pattern: $if2(%album artist%,$if(%album%,$if(%artist%,%artist%,),))

For now, and this can also be done, I'll mount the rockbox iPod's entire archive and masstag that one, see how it looks. Edit: It works. With one caveat. If the album has several artists and none of the tracks have an AA field, then the AA field will not be consistent across the album.

[croxis]

I've a patch
if you create a file named virt_albumartist.db
in the rockbox dir and build the database it
fills albumartist with artist if missing here:
https://gerrit.rockbox.org/r/c/rockbox/+/6514

Thank you very much for this patch!

I have applied it to the latest revision and built it.

Tested on a Sansa Clip+ and an iPod Classic and the old behavior is back.

Thank you guys. Thanks also for the patch.

I realize my and OPs message is the typical "It used to work for me!" use case regression where you could argue our approach is wrong. Unfortunately with music tagging what's 'perfect practice' is a bit up in the air. Some people say the AA field is not necessary if Artist is consistent across the album, but not all players work like this. Having the AA field always present is certainly the idiot proof approach. I'm considering masstagging my music archive to be done with it, but getting this right is a bit of a risk in case something doesn't work.

Here's how it can be done with the foobar2000 Masstagger plugin. There may be breakage if individual tracks of an album have an AA tag that deviates from the newly written tag, for some reason. What this does exactly is check if the Album Artist tag is empty, and if the Album tag exists. Both being the case, it will copy the Artist tag to Album Artist.

Select "Format value from other fields"
Destination field: ALBUM ARTIST
Formatting pattern: $if2(%album artist%,$if(%album%,$if(%artist%,%artist%,),))

For now, and this can also be done, I'll mount the rockbox iPod's entire archive and masstag that one, see how it looks. Edit: It works.

I can also confirm this as an alternative solution if you don't want to compile or wait for the patch to be merged.