LMS-Community
Enhancement request: Add Producer, Label & Engineer as browsable entities under My Music
MusicBrainz, discogs etc. often times include metadata relating to an album's Producer, Label & Engineer. These tags are recognised by LMS when ingesting albums but are not currently leveraged within the application. Being able to find and browse albums produced by a particular producer (e.g. I'm almost certain to enjoy albums produced by Dan Auerbach) would be really useful, as would be the ability to browse all albums in one's library by a record label e.g. ECM. Label's often sign artists who's music is in a similar vein to others they've signed, so it's a great way to explore. Same can be said for the work of those responsible for Engineering
This would likely necessitate the inclusion oF ENGINEER, LABEL & PRODUCER to LMS' Contributor Roles for inclusion during scanning of a library.
Implementing the suggestion above will enable the above presentation to be turned into something akin to this:
Albums released on ECM:
Albums produced by Dan Auerbach:
Thoughts from others?
I think it could be helpful (for all three of your suggestions) to collect data about which formats support which tags, how different taggers store them (if they're non-standard), and how they could be mapped to each other. Without a lot of preparation work such changes would mostly likely just open up a can of worms where people would become confused and complain because some files would work as expected and others not.
And then you'd have to come up with an idea how all of this should be represented in the various UIs. Grouping in menus might be easy and obvious. But showing additional textual information might be painful in many cases.
It might be easier to get feedback from others if you started a thread on forums.slimdevices.com, pointing at these suggestions here.
I always find the overview of the tag mapping which MusicBrainz Picard uses informative as an overview what format supports which tag: https://picard-docs.musicbrainz.org/en/appendices/tag_mapping.html
@terual thanks for the reminder! I think you shared the link before, when I was asking the same... I keep forgetting. Ouch!
@mherger Given you've extended scanning to pick up RELEASETYPE, would you consider adding Producer, Label & Engineer tags to the scan operation and exposing them when providing album details? I'm guessing they would all be contributor roles, and could then be clicked through to find all albums by contributor role, much as can be done with artist and composer at present?
We need people who contribute code and commit to the project not only as ambassadors, but as developers. As you can see from the Release Type implementation there's nothing simple about such changes. In order to make such changes there's not just adding a column to a database, or reading values from the files.
@michaelherger, could you point me to the changes you've made to accommodate RELEASETYPE (just the files containing the relevant code blocks) so I can see whether I can make sense of them them and if so, attempt the enhancement?
I think you what you have in mind doesn't have to do much with the release type work. Contributors are handled in the scanner (you'd have to add reading of those roles for each file format supported) in Slim/Formats and Slim/Music, handling of them in Slim/Schema/Contributor.pm and Slim/Control/Queries.pm (the sub artistsQuery). Once that's done you should be able to add browse modes for those roles using the Advanced Browsemodes plugin.
Maybe the query doesn't even need to be updated, as it relies on the others to provide the data.