[FR] Add support for the albumartist ID3 tag

[alanorth]

1. Describe the solution you'd like I wish Music Player GO supported the ID3 album artist tag. Many albums by one artist feature other artists. The main artist is usually recorded in the albumartist tag, with the artist tag having all artists on the particular track. It's messy and frustrating when the artist explorer shows:

• Artist
• Artist ft. other Artist
• Artist ft. other other Artist

See here in Music Player GO:

3. Additional context This is how it looked in the old Google Music, as well as current Vanilla, Odyssey, and VLC. Much cleaner and more sensible in my opinion.

Vanilla:

Odyssey:

VLC:

Thank you for developing Music Player GO as open source software!

[OxygenCobalt]

I think the problem with this is that MediaStore [The way that MPGO loads music] really does not support the album artist field that well.

The artist database uses the normal artist tag, the album database has no option to load the ALBUM_ARTIST tag, and while using the ALBUM_ARTIST projection on the song would work, it's not very efficient [Its better to split your projections across the album/song databases for IO efficiency]

What VLC and Vanilla do is load the music by reading the files directly and then store it in their own database. This is incredibly difficult to get right and isn't good UX as the user has to wait for awhile to get all their music loaded. Odyssey does use MediaStore, but it relies on a weird quirk with artist IDs to determine what is an album artist and what isn't, which is a non-starter efficiency-wise.

This seems to be a problem without any good solutions, sadly. I would just recommend to modify your music metadata to copy your Album Artist tag to your Artist tag, or use VLC/Vanilla.

TL;DR: Google over-engineered the music loading API and now we all have to deal with it. Blame them.

[alanorth]

Thanks for the explanation. Yeah I've noticed that VLC and vanilla implement their own file scanners. What is strange is that the Google Music app (I think it's retired?) made proper use of album artists for local music.

I don't know how anyone uses most of these Android music applications. It's so annoying to have all the featured artists in the main artists tab in all of them!

[OxygenCobalt]

Google Play Music handles most of the metadata management server-side as far as I'm aware. It only really scans MediaStore for the basic files and then queries for the metadata from the servers [Kind of like Last.fm integration but google-ized]. It may not, but since the source code isn't open I doubt we'll ever know.

I can definitely see why it sucks [Even if I personally don't use the album artist tag]. Most my explanation came from me attempting to integrate album artist support into my music player, but I think its still possible to add it to MPGO given that it only loads songs instead of making multiple different projections, it would just hurt efficiency.

[oniGino]

See comment in #466 supposedly album_artist is supported in the API but remains undocumented.. might be worth testing for those who have time.