Support and General Use > Audio Playback, Database and Playlists

Rockbox 4.0 - Album Artist changed behaviour

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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:

--- Quote from: Bilgus on May 16, 2025, 01:44:01 PM ---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

--- End quote ---

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.


--- Quote from: HandUndFuss on May 17, 2025, 03:41:45 PM ---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.

--- End quote ---

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

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