frank_from_hh;413199 Wrote: > What is the role of artist, album artist, track artist, whatever else > artist in SC? When is the one shown and when is the other shown? Is > there any up to date description of tags and their use in SC? > They are largely an internal-representation, used by SC to bridge the gap between scanning tags from files, and displaying hierarchies of music in the music library.
Generally, you don't have to worry too much about contributor roles, unless something goes wrong (eg. doesn't seem to be displayed where you believe it should). Contributor roles are "artists" who have involvement on songs in various ways: Artist contributor: the main performing artist(s) on the song. Band/Orchestra contributor: the name of the band (or orchestra) performing on a song. People may use this in different ways. eg. for a classical collection, it would hold the orchestra. For a popular music collection, it could hold the name of the backing band, eg Artist=Buddy Holly and Band=The Crickets. I use Band for aliases of the same artist name - for example, I enter Artist=Robert Plant, Artist=Jimmy Page, Band=Page & Plant. Another example is Artist="A Silver Mt. Zion", Band="Thee Silver Reveries and Tra-La band" (this band have performed under various names - I can find the music either by the artist or the band. Album Artist contributor: when an album artist tag has been provided that groups all songs on the album to belong to one main artist. Any artists that then perform on an album artist song are known as track artists. Track Artist contributor: this is a funny one, where the artist on a song is actually labelled as a track artist instead of artist, when there is an album artist contibutor role present. Other contributor roles exist (conductor, composer, etc), and there may be more added in the future (original artist, for example). > Is there any up to date description of tags and their use in SC? There is some info in the wiki, explaining what tags SC accepts, and how the contributor roles are populated. But I don't know if it is up to date. There haven't been many changes made to SC for scanning this information into the DB in a long time. > I have the impression that quite a lot automatism is going on depending > on the tags (and SC surely does a great job). But shouldn't this be > configurable? > Generally, no. Tags should have one identitied purpose, and it should not be configurable how SC handles them. The more it is configurable, the more complicated it is for people to understand, and for support to work out what a users problem is. Most settings are to tell SC how to display information that it has already scanned into its music library. Some scanner logic is configurable, mainly to overcome issues with how tags have been mis-used within other applications. > In my limited and simple world, I have all my music stored as FLAC, each > track is an individual file. I try to tag all these tracks using only > standard tags (but standard does not seem to be unambiguously defined > ;-) ). You are better off with FLAC, it's a better standard will less ambiguity, so things will generally work better. > I would like to be able to see these tags when I browse my music, or > when a song is playing. And I surely do have my own idea on what a tag > means (e.g. somewhere in the help SC tells me that the BAND tag is > sometimes called ALBUMARTIST by other programs. Well, for me BAND would > be PERFORMER and ALBUMARTIST is completly different). > There are two clear steps: 1. Scan tags from files into the SC Music Library (database). 2. Display the content of the Music Library in the application (WebUI, playerUI, etc). SC will look for a known set of tags in various file/music tagging formats. These are not stored in the same way within SC; the structure is different in order to be able to browse music efficiently. Every contributor on a song (artist, band, orchestra, composer, conductor, etc) gets stored in one distinct list of artists, and their role on the song is also recorded. So Robert Plant and Jimmy Page could be artists performing on a song, "Page & Plant" could be the name of the band, etc. Depending on chosen Music Library settings and the way you want to browse the library (by artist or by album, etc), these contributors will either be included or excluded from the list. So, if you tick "Band/Orchestra" in library settings, you would get Bands in the Browse Artist list. When there are guest performers on songs, an Album Artist tag can be entered in the files to group all songs so the album appears only under that given album artist (otherwise it would be a compilation album). In flac and other tag formats, the tag would be called "ALBUM ARTIST" (or ALBUMARTIST). mp3 is more awkward, in that other apps broke the id3v2.3 standard, and mis-used the BAND tag (called the TPE2 frame), to hold the album artist. So, there is an option to use BAND tag to represent Band contibutors, or to use BAND tag to represent Album Artist contributors. So, if you don't use mp3 files, you can ignore that option ;-) -- Philip Meyer ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Philip Meyer's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=95 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=61689 _______________________________________________ ripping mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/ripping
