Thanks for your interest Scott, and trying this out
(2015-09-29, 23:37)scott967 Wrote: Is this expected behavior? What is the intent of album_artist for conductor or composer? I should note my convention (may be just me) is that ALBUM defines a composer's "work" or standard collection, (so a physical medium/release might contain multiple "albums", but all "songs" that are tagged with ALBUM have the same composer as the album).
Yes, that is the behaviour I expect.
Users vary in the way they currently tag classical music, what they put in ARTIST or ALBUMARTIST, all different work arounds for the lack of specific support. To get the benefit of the changes I am making there will be some retagging work, but I can't see a reasonable way around that. Should be able to set up scripts for some of it at least.
Under your convention the tracks from my CD with Bruch and Mendelsson Violin Concertos would be tagged as two albums, is that right? Out of interest how about an overture tacked at the end of a symphony album, but same composer, is that one album or two? I can understand why you might have done that, but hope in a subsequent improvement to handle the identifying work issue. I like maintaining the concept of an "album" as CD/release, and I think some others do too.
But let's explain my approach.
Standard tags, with the exception of album artist and album title, are at song level, so without proliferating custom tags we have limited ways to identify roles for artists at an album level. But we can do it! Processing checks the ALBUMARTIST names against the COMPOSER, CONDUCTOR and ENSEMBLE tags for all the songs. If an album artist has a role for one or more of the songs then it is given that role in album_artist table.
Frequently I would put composer, orchestra and conductor names in both ARTIST and ALBUMARTIST tags for each track, the mix of lots of different kinds of artists in the artist list is no longer an issue because we can filter what role(s) we list. However, the situation of an album with contributions for more than one composer is much like having featured artists verses "various artists". Examples probably help.
1) Let's take the album
http://musicbrainz.org/release/c7a267c7-...57de8abe0f as example. I would tag that as follows
ARTIST: "Mozart / Berlin Philharmoniker / Karajan"
ALBUMARTIST: "Mozart / Berlin Philharmoniker / Karajan"
MUSICBRAINZ_ARTISTID: b972f589-fb0e-474e-b64a-803b0364fa75, dea28aa9-1086-4ffa-8739-0ccc759de1ce, d2ced2f1-6b58-47cf-ae87-5943e2ab6d99
MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID: b972f589-fb0e-474e-b64a-803b0364fa75, dea28aa9-1086-4ffa-8739-0ccc759de1ce, d2ced2f1-6b58-47cf-ae87-5943e2ab6d99
COMPOSER: "Mozart"
CONDUCTOR: "Karajan"
ENSEMBLE: "Berlin Philharmoniker"
Then the libary will have "Mozart", "Berlin Philharmoniker" and "Karajan" as separate artists, even if I have albumartistsonly enabled. But I could just show composers and of these Mozart would be the only one in the list.
2) But for albums with music from multiple composers I may choose a primary (album) composer, and leave the others to only come up (like featured artists) if albumartistsonly is disabled, or as search results.
I am not really into Wieniawski so I think of
http://musicbrainz.org/release/cd8faafd-...4db175df1c as a Tchaikovsky album and I would tag the Wieniawski tracks (leaving out MBID and first names for readability)
ARTIST: "Wieniawski / Bell / Ashkenazy / Cleveland"
ALBUMARTIST: "Tchaikovsky / Bell / Ashkenazy / Cleveland"
COMPOSER: "Wieniawski"
CONDUCTOR: "Ashkenazy"
ENSEMBLE: "Cleveland"
and the rest with "Tchaikovsky" in the obvious places.
If albumartistsonly is enabled then when looking at composers only "Tchaikovsky" gets listed.
3) Or if I consider Wieniawski as significant as Tchaikovsky I could tag all tracks with
ALBUMARTIST: "Tchaikovsky / Wieniawski / Bell / Ashkenazy / Cleveland"
4) Album of tracks from different composers I would not include the composer in ALBUMARTIST.
Hope that makes my ideas a bit clearer.