New importer UI displays canonical artist name instead of artist credit (even when `artist_credit` is enabled)

[emiham]

Problem

I'm trying to import the album Surf by Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment. For some reason beets wants to change one of the artist names from the alias to the canonical name (Donnie Trumpet -> Nico Segal), even though there is no release with that credit. This has always worked fine for me with single artists, maybe the issue is with the combination of multiple artists (plus join phrases) and aliases? I can't think of another release which has both right now, but I'll try to find something and see if that runs into the same problem.

Edit: Picard fetches the name properly, so it doesn't seem to be a problem on MB's end.

Edit 2: The issue doesn't seem to be present in the packaged version, only in Git builds.

  Match (97.6%):
  Nico Segal & The Social Experiment - Surf
  ≠ artist
  MusicBrainz, Digital Media, 2015, XW, None, None, None
  https://musicbrainz.org/release/2f536a6a-ffbe-4396-a6a5-098302d6c4d0
  ≠ Artist: Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment -> Nico Segal & The Social Experiment
  * Album: Surf
     * (#1) Miracle (4:10)
     * (#2) Slip Slide (3:59)
     * (#3) Warm Enough (3:21)
     * (#4) Nothing Came to Me (3:30)
     * (#5) Wanna Be Cool (3:27)
     * (#6) Windows (3:56)
     * (#7) Caretaker (1:35)
     * (#8) Just Wait (3:47)
     * (#9) Familiar (3:53)
     * (#10) SmthnthtIwnt (1:51)
     * (#11) Go (4:22)
     * (#12) Questions (1:54)
     * (#13) Something Came to Me (3:10)
     * (#14) Rememory (2:34)
     * (#15) Sunday Candy (3:46)
     * (#16) Pass the Vibes (2:30)
➜ [A]pply, More candidates, Skip, Use as-is, as Tracks, Group albums,
Enter search, enter Id, aBort?

Setup

• OS: Arch Linux
• Python/beets versions:

beets version 1.6.1
Python version 3.11.6
plugins: badfiles, chroma, copyartifacts, embedart, fetchart, inline, lyrics, mbsubmit, mbsync, missing, mpdupdate, thumbnails, types, unimported

• Turning off plugins made problem go away (yes/no): no

[sampsyo]

Huh, that is a particularly weird case! This is an instance where everyone definitely knows the record as being by "Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment"; it would be really weird to call the artist anything else.

Can you try enabling the artist_credit option to see if that makes things more predictable? https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/reference/config.html#artist-credit

I know it's a weird edge case, but I'm not certain what the policy should be here with artist_credit off…

[emiham]

I had artist_credit on from the beginning, but I tried both disabling it as well as creating a new config file with only artist_credit: yes, and I still get this behavior.

[sampsyo]

Hmm; that doesn't seem right in that case!

Another thing to check is whether this is an issue with the new importer UI, rather than the actual handling of metadata. If you successfully finish the import, what does $albumartist contain for this album?

[emiham]

You're right, it seems to be (mostly) a UI issue!

The only field that has the wrong (?) name is the sort field, but I'm not sure how that usually works together with artist_credit.

This is what exiftool gives me for all artist related fields (it doesn't seem to handle duplicate tags so some fields are missing):

Album Artist                    : Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment
Albumartist                     : Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment
Albumartist Credit              : Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment
Albumartistsort                 : Segal, Nico & Social Experiment, The
Albumartists                    : The Social Experiment
Album Artists                   : The Social Experiment
Albumartists Credit             : The Social Experiment
Albumartists Sort               : Social Experiment, The
Artist                          : Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment
Artist Credit                   : Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment
Artistsort                      : Segal, Nico & Social Experiment, The
Artists                         : The Social Experiment
Artists Credit                  : The Social Experiment
Artists Sort                    : Social Experiment, The
Musicbrainz Albumartistid       : 11f007c4-2963-4379-89bc-923b935b731a
Musicbrainz Artistid            : 11f007c4-2963-4379-89bc-923b935b731a

[sampsyo]

Got it; thanks!! I'm also not sure what's supposed to go on with the sort name… that seems like it could be a separate issue.

More pertinently, however, I think we should fix the new importer UI to show the artist credit. I'm not sure whether this should be true all the time or only when artist_credit is enabled (probably the latter), but we should match the behavior of the old UI.