Compilations

[hinto-janai]

Feature

Compilation support.

A single Album with varying Artist's.

Metadata tag will most likely be Compilation and the proprietary itunescompilationflag.

Problem

There must be an owner of this Album, aka an Artist.

Within this compilation Album struct, what Artist will the album.artist point to?

It's unclear in a compilation who "owns" the Album.

[jansol]

As far as I've seen usually, there is a separate AlbumArtist tag that is used for the album itself, regardless of whether it is flagged as a compilation. Each individual track in the album can then have its own Artist tag independently of that. The "owner" of the album would be the AlbumArtist.

[hinto-janai]

Yes, that's actually the first tag Festival looks for when looking for an artist.

There's not really a standard though, some compilations won't have the same AlbumArtist in every song, some won't have an Artist at all (Composer, Performer, etc).

[jansol]

I'd argue that compilations with inconsistent AlbumArtist are simply mistagged or the files are pulled from different albums and just slapped in a folder together for convenience. In general I'd model the metadata information fairly closely to MusicBrainz model & style since that is documented in great detail, which makes it much easier to achieve predictable behaviour across different programs. I also haven't seen any other (documented) scheme with comparable accuracy & flexibility.

Opinions will of course vary :shrug: The full model is quite involved after all, and only a fraction of it actually maps to well-known tag names in files. At least *-mbid tags are somewhat standard, so it is easy to pull all additional information from the web when those tags are present.

I guess a sensible solution would be to lump tracks together by folder, additionally creating separate albums for each AlbumArtist, or if that is missing, for each Artist in the folder. Maybe even try Performer and Composer as fallbacks if you deem it necessary. And if there's no artist information, just fall back to "Unknown Artist" for the entire folder. But tbh I'd question whether that isn't already way more effort than it is worth. In the end it's just a heuristic, and the correct solution would be to just fix the tags in the first place. For people who just want to have arbitrary collections I'd consider letting them specify a file path template that specifies the layout of their library, something like ${Artist}/${Year}-${Album}/${trackno}-${Title}